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The Unfathomable Christ 


WORKS BY 
FREDERICK F. SHANNON 


The Economic Eden 


God’s Faith in M an 


The Breath in the Winds 
The Enchanted Universe 
The New Personality 
The Soul’s Atlas 


The Land of Beginning Again 





The 
Untathomable Christ 


And Other Sermons 


By 


FREDERICK F. SHANNON, D. D. 
Minister of Central Church, Chicago, Ill. Author of 
‘*The Soul’s Atlas,’’ ‘‘The Economic Eden,’’ 
**God’s Faith in Man,’? ete. 





New Yor« CHICAGO 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


LoNDON AND EpDINBURGH 


Copyright, 1926, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 99 George Street 


To 
MR. AND MRS. FREDERICK H. RAWSON 
Workers 
in the Kingdom of Humanity 


and Learners 


in the School of Christ 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
In 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/unfathomablechrid0shan 


VII. 


Contents 


THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST ........ 11 
Luke 8:25 


INVISIBLE BILLS FOR INTANGIBLE Depts 30 
Matthew 18:28 


ASPECTS oF THE EpUCATIONAL IpEAL.. 51 
Romans 7:25 
THE SDIRRERENT: ROAD HUY oie ecto s 72 «© 


Matthew 2:12 


Tue APPEAL OF THE CHRISTIAN MInN- 
ISTRY Me iy eee ete Ue dao ont ggey Monae 97 
Colossians 4:17 


HE GODOB SUCCESS Ui arene Siu seston 116 : 
Iuke 3:19, 20 


Ghrisi’s NEW LAW ih dase ee 1320 


John 13:34, 35 


THE IDEALS OF BRITAIN AND AMERICA... 148 
1 Chronicles 16: 31 


ADVENTURES OF THE CHRISTIAN 
SOTTO tures ie teen oil ayeL unos trae 163 
Hebrews 12:18, 22 


ADVENTURES OF THE CHRISTIAN 
LF Od GL OD a LN A HN RS pa 179 
Hebrews 12:18, 22 


bth 


ey ihe 
may ; 





I 
THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


“And being afraid they marvelled, saying one to an- 
other, Who then is this, that He commandeth even the 


winds and the water, and they obey him?’—LuKE 
rue). 


UR text reminds us that in stress of circum- 
() stances the soul sometimes frames its 
mightiest questions. A moment before the 
disciples were panic-stricken, terribly frightened by 
the sudden storm on the lake. But while the storm 
was raging, the Master slept on, as if wind and wave 
had said to each other: ‘He will not mind our play- 
ing a bit while He takes His bodily rest. If we get 
too noisy, He will command us to be still.” So, per- 
haps the Master would have slept right on, had not 
the disciples become terror-smitten. Awakening 
Him, they ask: ‘Master, carest Thou not that we 
perish?” A great question that! It is dynamic, 
historic, even cosmic. It fits the tongue of all times 
and peoples. For as our earth-ship goes sailing 
through the lakes of space at terrific speed, is it not 
swept by storms of sin and waves of death? Does 
Anybody care? Or is the Eternal asleep? But if 
Somebody does care, is He able and willing to 
silence the planetary storm—sometime, somewhere? 
Verily, standing on tiptoe and even trembling with 
fear, the soul asks its biggest questions, 
11 


12 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


Moreover, in their hour of distress, did not the 
disciples ask one of the most profoundly interest- 
ing questions man ever heard? After our Lord 
had quieted the storm, they asked: ‘‘Who. then 
is this, that He commandeth even the winds and 
the water, and they obey Him?” That, surely, is 
one of the absolute questions of history. It is so 
compelling, so fascinating, so central that all ulti- 
mate thinking revolves about it. Men push it into 
the background, and lo! it suddenly turns up again 
in the foreground. Some time ago a scholar said 
that, up to the present, Christianity had weathered 
every storm of opposition—infidelity, materialism, 
science, philosophy, and what not. But now, he 
added, we are in the age of psychology and the 
question is: Will Christianity be able to weather 
psychology? Why, certainly! Psychology is the 
special field in which Christianity thrives. Its 
greatest victories have always been won there; 
they will continue to be won there; for Christian- 
ity is, transcendently, a matter of the soul. Yet, 
after all, true Christianity is Christ—the Eternal 
Christ in the souls of men. We are to study, then, 
the second of the two questions the disciples asked 
in their time of stress and fear. Such a considera- 
tion leads straight to the unfathomable Christ. 

I 

Consider Christ’s Lordship over the cosmic 
forces. For, after we have reduced Jesus to the 
“irreducible minimum,” there is still the very defi- 
nite impression that He is, in some unique fashion, 
Lord of the physical world. We meet this fact 
here in the first of the four “works” in the eighth 


THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 13 


chapter of St. Luke. Nor is this an isolated case. 
We have it, also, in the feeding of the five thousand, 
in the turning of the water into wine, in the walk- 
ing on the sea. These are all set down as a part of 
His earthly career, always keeping this question on 
the tongue of the centuries: ‘Who then is this that 
even the winds and the water obey Him?” His- 
tory’s most interesting question, the whole of his- 
tory will be required to give it a complete answer. 

“But,’”’ says someone, “these are violations of, or 
contrary to, Nature.” The objection is, of course, 
familiar and unscientifically dogmatic. Occasion- 
ally a superficial preacher, trying to conceal his 
mental and spiritual nakedness, joins in the chorus 
of the groundlings by saying: ‘We now know that 
Jesus never performed the miracles attributed to 
Him.” To all such assertions, there are two answers. 

First: No one knows enough about Nature to 
positively assert that the “works” of Jesus violated 
any law whatsoever. What if He worked in har- 
mony with laws which may sometime be well under- 
stood? In any case, the philosophic scientist today 
shows how far we have journeyed from the obso- 
lete mechanistic conception of the universe held by 
such out-of-date thinkers as Haeckel and his school. 
Opening the latest, most authentic works on physi- 
cal science, one comes upon samples of the modern 
viewpoint. ‘The very dust,” says J. Arthur Thom- 
son, “has a complexity and activity heretofore un- 
imagined.” Again: ‘The new theory of the atom 
amounts almost to a new conception of the uni- 
verse.” Once again: “The great question today is: 
is there one primordial substance from which all the 


14 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


varying forms of matter have been evolved?” 
Speaking of the eight planets composing our solar 
system, he says that they “are secondary bodies, 
but they are most important, because they are the 
only globes in which there can be life, as we know 
hfe.” 

I have italicized the last four words. They not 
only qualify the preceding statement, but they dis- 
close the attitude of the higher thinking practiced 
by scientific men who are also human beings. Such 
thinkers refuse to allow their knowledge of physi- 
cal facts so to victimize them that they become as 
fanatically dogmatic as any medievalist. Is it nota 
distinct gain that our most thorough-going scientific 
workers have learned that there are more things in 
heaven and earth than are revealed by retorts and 
test tubes? We know now that the cosmos is not a 
dead, lifeless uniformity; we think of it somewhat 
as a vast organism, a vitalized entity, alive from 
atom to angel. “The very dust’’—let me repeat the 
words again—“has a complexity and activity here- 
tofore unmagined.”’ Yet has not the dust always 
been complex, always active? If even the dust has 
managed to baffle us so long, spirit may continue to 
perplex us for sometime to come! 

Consequently, the old type of scientist who goes 
about screaming, “My laws! My laws!” is done 
for, as well as his parrots and hangers-on, whether 
clerical or lay. Yet we do not believe one whit less 
in the majesty of law; we simply believe vastly 
more in the possibility of human ignorance, and, 
therefore, our once loud-mouthed “ignorant liberal- 
isms” are now quite unappalling. Never was there 


THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 15 


a time when men had the scientific right to believe 
in the absolute spirituality of the universe as today. 
We may not only affirm that there is one primordial 
substance from which all the varying forms of mat- 
ter have been evolved; but that, furthermore, with- 
in, behind, and beyond that one primordial sub- 
stance is the living God—even the God and Father 
of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. In final 
matters, ‘‘ask saints of Heaven,” said Chaucer, 
“for they can tell.”’ What if the saints have always 
lived where the scientists are at last slowly arriv- 
ing? Anyway, the only method of getting on 
speaking terms with Reality is to try it. This is 
the laboratory method applied in the realm of Chris- 
tian faith; and it never fails to work, if the worker 
himself is honest and faithful. Do you remember 
how Thoreau discovered how much pumpkin there 
was in the back yard? Why, he simply planted a 
pumpkin seed. In due season that seed, working 
with the soil, the atmosphere, the solar system, and 
the unfathomable mystery of its own being, hung 
fifty pounds of pumpkin over Thoreau’s back yard 
fence. In other words, the seed did what all the 
chemists in the world could not have done, without 
the seed. In quest of pumpkin, they might have 
analyzed the soil until doomsday and found none— 
without the seed! Well, the seed of Christian faith 
is more vital, more germinant, more creative in the 
soul than any pumpkin seed in the soil. Plant it, 
O man, and it will hang the fruits of the Spirit all 
over the garden fences of your being. Never again 
will you be guilty of the simpleton’s empty boast: 
“The miracles of Jesus are contrary to the laws of 


16 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


Nature.” Why, the simpleton’s poor little spirit- 
ually denatured mind is simply functioning contrary 
to the wonder and beauty of being! 

Second: A further answer to this outworn 
method of approach is in the fact that Christ was 
such a Person that cosmic forces naturally obeyed 
Him. He exhibited “the consciousness of being an 
agent and playfellow of the original laws of the 
world.” Ultimately, the miracle is not in the thing, 
but the Thinker. ‘Obey the law of a force, and the 
force will obey you.” Is not man doing this on a 
tremendous scale today? Every human discovery 
begins just here. Man obeys the law of sight, and 
sight obeys him by enabling him to see great dis- | 
tances. ‘Then must there not be sight in the uni- 
verse? Man obeys the law of hearing, and hearing 
obeys him by enabling him to hear across vast 
spaces. Must there not be hearing ini the universe? 
Man obeys the law of thought, and thought obeys 
him by enriching and expanding his mental life. 
Must there not ‘be thought in the universe? The 
worlds are full of eyes, ears, and tongues. 

Perhaps the first radio-telephone message to Lon- 
don was sent by President Thayer of the American 
Telegraph and Telephone Company. Commercial 
code messages were sent before, but Mr. Thayer’s 
was the first distinctly transmitted radiophone con- 
versation across the sea. Now people heard him in 
London, but they had no equipment for telling him 
so. While they could receive, they could not re- 
spond. Would it be good sense to argue that the 
Englishmen’s lack of radio equipment nullified the 
fact that President Thayer actually talked across 


THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 17 


the sea? Hardly! The rational conclusion would 
be something like this: ‘We heard Mr. Thayer’s 
voice distinctly over here in London—no doubt 
about it! We wanted to tell him so, but lacked the 
radio-telephony means. However, sometime we ex- 
pect to have the necessary equipment for making 
adequate response.’’ Every week I receive checks 
and messages from the radio congregation of Cen- 
tral Church. They hear me distinctly, but I cannot 
hear them. Yet does the fact that I cannot hear 
my great invisible congregation prove that they 
cannot hear me? Why, these checks, dollar bills, 
and letters are welcome evidence to the contrary! 
Now what I am coming at is this: The universe 
is fairly alive with facts and forces of which we 
are as yet densely ignorant. But as human person- 
ality learns how, by obeying and commanding these 
facts and forces, to manipulate them for beneficent 
ends, the world will go so far in advance of our 
present attainments as to make these seem like 
child’s play. The relation of human personality to 
the mysteries hidden away in the cosmic storehouse 
is as yet somewhat elementary, notwithstanding the 
progress man has made. I rarely step into a tele- 
phone booth, drop a nickle in the slot, and ask for 
Hyde Park 3036, that I am not reminded of this 
fact. For the universe is the garment of the living 
God, woven without seam from top to bottom. 
Somewhere within its ample folds are ready re- 
sponses to all feeling, finding fingers. Or, to return 
to the figure of the telephone, as man learns more 
perfectly to drop in the cash of thought and faith, 


the fact of communion, creation, and revelation will 
2 


18 ~-THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


come forth to meet and greet him with growing 
splendor and power. 

Why, therefore, being Who He was and is, 
should it be deemed incredible that wind and wave 
obeyed the voice of our Lord and Master? Are we 
so hard put to it to be atheists and skeptics that, in 
a system of teeming wonders, we must conclude 
that matter is superior to mind, that physical power 
is higher than Christly Personality? We shall 
probably go on forever asking, What manner of 
Man is this? Our answer will not be far wrong if 
we reply, “Just the kind of Man that it is perfectly 
natural for wind and wave to obey.” 


I] 


A second case shows Christ’s lordship over bodily 
disease. It is the woman afflicted by hemorrhage 
of long standing. Physicians of the time had failed 
to relieve her. Approaching Jesus from behind, 
she touched one of the four tassels of His garment 
and was immediately cured. Then she sought to 
steal away with her stolen benefit. But no! Ours 
is a supersensitive universe—so sensitive that the 
perfume of the rose troubles the star. Jesus asked, 
“Who is it that touched Me?” After all had denied 
touching Him, Peter said, “Master, the multitudes 
press Thee and crush Thee.”’ Yet how can masses 
of pressing, crushing matter short-circuit the heal- 
ing power of the self-conscious God? Impossible! 
And so Jesus said, ‘‘Some one did touch Me; for I 
perceived that power had gone forth from Me.” 
Then, assured that her identity was known, the 


THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 19 


woman. ‘“‘came trembling’’—for her touch had com- 
municated Levitical uncleanness—and confessed 
that it was she who had touched Him. And Jesus 
said unto her, ‘Daughter, thy faith hath made thee 
whole; go in peace.” 

Now, what are the two facts here disclosed in 
Christ’s lordship over bodily disease? First, there 
is the manifestation of healing power on its physi- 
cal side. Perhaps this woman’s case resembles, 
somewhat, cases of healing not altogether unknown 
in our day. Is it akin to what we know as auto- 
suggestion or psycho-analysis? We need not be 
surprised or alarmed at what we are seeing and 
hearing. Did not the Master say, “Greater works 
than these shall he do; because I go unto the Fa- 
ther?” 

“But,” someone interposes, “so many of these 
modern operators do not even mention the name of 
the Master.” O, foolish ones and blind, do you not 
remember how our Master rebuked James and John, 
who wanted to call down fire and destroy the in- 
hospitable Samaritans? However, I am not trying 
to bring the Lord Christ down to the modern mind; 
I would like to see the modern mind brought up to 
the mind of Christ. Meanwhile, is it not well for 
us to consider that the Eternal Christ is in all mind, 
ancient, medieval, and modern, whether recognized 
or not? We must not conclude that Christ is not 
around simply because we are not aware of Him. 
One of the queerest of human aberrations, thought 
that brilliant Englishwoman, is this: When people 
learn how things are made, they immediately rush 
to the conclusion that God did not make them! 


20 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


Thus, the fact that certain people see nothing more 
in Christ than just another saint or prophet is no 
reflection whatever upon Christ; it is a little side- 
light on certain people’s “insight.” Meantime, as 
Lowell suggested, the universe is fireproof (though 
not foolproof; according to Dr. Cadman) and we 
can afford to strike a match. 

The second fact here is our Lord’s manifestation 
of saving love. “Thy faith hath made thee whole” 
—that is the physical healing. ‘Go in peace’’—that 
is the spiritual healing. It is the first golden note 
of heavenly music heard only down the green paths 
of forgiveness. It is not altogether strange that in 
a world where flesh and blood relentlessly press and 
crush us, we are ofttimes stolidly indifferent to the 
greater, the spiritual work. Yet is it not unpardon- 
able for us to be content with the lesser when the 
greater is always close at hand, verifying one of oe 
abiding aspects of Christ’s Godhood? 

And what is that? Why, His power to forgive 
sins! ‘That is the point God in Christ is ever driv- 
ing home in his wonderful cures. For, is it not a 
fact that there is too much mired mind in an un- 
questionably attractive bodily setting? Cure all the 
physical diseases that flesh is heir to; perform all 
the brain operations which relieve criminals of the 
insane desire to debauch and slay. But think not 
that the root of human ills has thus been uncovered. 
Too many perfectly fit people, physically and men- 
tally, are at hand to gainsay any such conclusion. 
Therefore, we moderns need to recover the New 
Testament emphasis. Crippled bodies are dread- 
ful, but crippled souls are more dreadful still. Un- 


THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 21 


developed minds are pathetic, but unchristianized 
hearts are tragic. We mortals do not have to be in 
the horrible condition of Lady Macbeth to vindicate 
the truth of the doctor’s words to her husband and 
partner in crime: “More needs she the divine than 
the physician.” “For all have sinned,” says that in- 
spired diagnostician of the root-wrongs of mankind, 
“and fall short of the glory of God.” Face to face 
with his sin, man’s one hope is in Christ Jesus; no 
power in Heaven or upon the earth can help here 
but the power of God in Christ. “TI believe that an 
acute consciousness of sin is more needed now than 
an enormous accession of conceit,” says Professor 
William Lyon Phelps. ‘“The old theologians, with 
all their dogmatism, got down to the bedrock of 
human nature; they believed in the reality of sin, 
and they did their utmost to convict their audiences; 
some hearers walked out of church realizing their 
shortcomings, and determined by the grace of God 
that something must be done to improve the situa- 
tion. And even now I believe that religious faith 
will elevate the average man more effectively than 
he can do it by talking encouragingly to himself. 
The latter method has all the disadvantage of try- 
ing to lift oneself by tugging at one’s boot straps.”’ 

So, we need both the human and the divine. 
Neglect of either impoverishes the central idea of 
Christianity; overemphasis of either neutralizes the 
efficiency of both; therefore, why not give both 
their rightful place in thought and practice? Christ 
Jesus is the God-Man; in Him humanity and Di- 
vinity are met together in absolute perfection. This 
is why Jesus is at once the riddle and the ruler of 


ee THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


the ages. Men cannot let Him go because He will 
not let men go. We travel down our long fool- 
trails, winding in and out, up and down, only to 
find Him standing over against us, not even so far 
as to be near, saying: ‘‘Come unto Me, all ye that 
labor, and are heavy laden, and I will give you 
rest.” The Being who can give rest—poise, perfect 
activity—to the soul, can surely breathe quietude 
into the heart of the storm and speak peace to the 
noise of the moaning wind. True, the sea is large, 
and our boats are small; but He made the sea, and 
the sea knows His voice. True, there are stars in 
the Milky Way a hundred thousand trillion miles 
beyond our sun; but “He made the stars also.” 
True, there is oppressive cold and dark in the vast, 
unlit gulfs of space; but both cold and dark are 
dispelled by His heavenly warmth and unearthly 
light. For there is no “broken stammer of the 
skies” in Christ’s speech; it is flawlessly round and 
full, star-clear and universe-deep, profound with its 
feeling of humanity and authentic with its con- 
sciousness of Godhood. ‘The Great Reconciler, He 
brings the discordant into unison; He interprets 
Moses and the Muses each to each, while all the 
reconciled join in the chant: 
“Ah! let the sweet birds of the Lord 
With earth’s waters make accord; 
Teach how the crucifix may be 
Carven from the laurel tree, 
Fruit of the Hesperides 
Burnish take on Eden trees, 
The Muses’ sacred grove be wet 
With the red dew of Olivet, 
And Sappho lay her burning brows 
In white Cecilia’s lap of snows!” 


THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 23 


Ii] 


Consider, now, the third case, in which Christ 
demonstrates His lordship over mental disorder. 
Leprosy, blindness, paralysis, dumbness, deafness, 
fever—every kind of mortal malady yielded up its 
terror to Him. Braving the Inferno of disease, He 
bade its victims all despair abandon and enter forth- 
with into health and hope. As Orpheus descended 
into Hades and brought the serpent-bitten Eurydice 
back to the upper world, so Christ entered the dens 
of doom and rescued the victims of sin, disease, and 
death. What an etiologist He was! He knew the 
origin of disease—why the hand was shriveled, why 
the flesh was drawn, why the eye was dead, why the 
tongue was wordless. In our day, of course, physi- 
ology, biology, chemistry, philosophy, and psychol- 
ogy have enabled man marvelously to explore his 
own mysterious being. Yet doubt not, my friends, 
“within that complex nature of ours are oceans of 
mystery which Thought may indeed explore, but 
which she cannot fathom, paths which the vulture 
eye of Reason hath not seen, whose voices are the 
voices of unknown tongues answering each other 
through the mist.” Yet do they not all recognize 
and obey the voice of Christ? His creative Word 
shivers through their impenetrable gloom and lo! 
new worlds of light and joy spring into being. 

But, surely, that wild, unstrung, chaotic piece of 
human nature named the Gadarene demoniac is one 
of the most appalling specimens that ever challenged 
our Lord’s healing and expulsive power. Naked, 
houseless, friendless, terrible with almost superhu- 


24 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


man strength and raging with homicidal mania, he 
lived in caves and tombs, far removed from human 
dwellings. For before the Christ of God came to 
earth, hospitals and asylums were almost unknown. 
Banished from society, this demoniac made the 
night hideous and the day itself a thing of dread. 
Here was a divided personality indeed, a subverted 
consciousness, an instance of lost self-identity. 
“The contradictory and often merely verbal ex- 
planations of the moderns,” says Giovanni Papini, 
“do not invalidate the fact that demoniacs, in many 
cases, are such in the real sense of the word.” 
Now, ours is the age of psychology; we know 
that in every human being lies a realm of unfathom- 
able mystery. We have learned to search out and 
correct countless ills, hiding away in secret lairs, 
that mind and flesh are heir to. Moreover, we are 
just on the edge of these occult realms; we shall 
steadily push our way beyond the twilight borders 
into the subtle interiors themselves. Yet, as I have 
just intimated, does not every new advance only 
disclose that in every human being is a world of in- 
exhaustible mystery? What terrors thunder, what 
splendors flash from within the unexplored depths 
of the soul! What heavens and what hells are even 
now forming within us! What abysses await the 
swinish human, what heights beckon to the climb- 
ing human! “There is infinitely more in a human 
consciousness,’ says Bergson, “than in a corre- 
sponding brain.”” We are all the time—the last one 
of us—leaning over the edge of the unfathomable. 
Unless man’s spiritual orbit is around Christ, the 
soul’s central sun, he flies off into the cold and dark- 


THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 25 


ness of religious space—an eccentric spiritual 
comet, a veritable wanderer through the heavens of 
reality, at home in none. 

Candidly, are there not other and more modern 
demons than the ones which tormented the degraded 
Gadarene? It may be that our modern devils, after 
all, are true descendants of their long-vanished an- 
cestors. There is, for example, the demon of un- 
belief. What a sly, powerful demon he is! No 
philosophic chains can bind him, no scientific fetters 
can hold him in. Ina universe continuously speak- 
ing of the living God, the demon of unbelief drives 
his victim into tombs of despair. Consider, also, 
the demon named selfish ambition. How subtle he 
1s, how voracious his appetite! Always agitated by 

“that last infirmity of noble minds,” the demon of 
ambition promises the soul what can never satisfy 
the soul; for— 


“It is by God decreed 
Fame shall not satisfy the highest need.” 


“Tt has been my lot to know,” says George John 
Romanes, “not a few of the famous men of our 
generation, and I have always observed that this is 
profoundly true...... As soon as one end of dis- 
tinction is reached, another is pined for. There is 
no finality to rest in, while disease and death are 
always standing in the background. Custom may 
even blind men to their misery so far as not to make 
them realize what is wanting; yet the want is 
there.’ And what shall we say of the demon of 
lying? At last he so completely possesses his dupe 
that truth itself becomes abnormal. Stripping 


26 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


every vestige of veracity away, he drives the liar 
into barren deserts of falsehood. One of the worst 
demons, surely, that can overtake a mortal is to be- 
come so morally perverted as to deliberately believe 
a falsehood, opposing the truth with a kind of dev- 
ilish delight in loving and making a lie. Moreover, 
who shall expel the demon of jealousy from souls 
thus ruinously possessed? The green-eyed mon- 
ster, mocking the meat it feeds on, jealousy urges 
men forth into the waste places of hate, cutting 
themselves and others with stones as deadly as 
death. 


Evidently, then, we are not now dealing with 
“old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long’ ago.” 
We are living in the tragic present. We are here 
facing problems for whose solution auto-sugges- 
tion, psychology, and psycho-analysis are inade- 
quate. Raking among the ashes of a burnt-out per- 
sonality with the latest mental fads may disclose the 
magnificence of human nature even in its ruins; 
but to create a clean heart in the depth of moral 
squalor, and to renew a right spirit warped and 
withered by the practiced wrongs of a lifetime— 
why this, according to all whose opinion is worth 
while, requires the efficacy of Godhead in the Cross 
of Jesus Christ. Oh, give me a God Who can ex- 
pel the demons of unbelief, of lying, of selfish am- 
bition, of jealousy, and all that black confederacy 
of deviltry, to which these belong, and I will let the 
panderers to the groundlings pander on as to the 
Goodhood of Jesus! As for myself, I prefer to be 
humbly numbered with that company out of all 


THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 27 


climes and peoples who know and believe “‘that the 
Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins.” 

Give little heed, therefore, to these shallowly 
clever preachers who, as they modestly confess, do 
not have their copy pigeon-holed by the city editor! 
By the way, when did the average editor become an 
average judge of Christian values? I may be 
wrong, but I tell you there appears to be something 
insinuatingly suspicious about this clerical craze to 
be classed among the heretics. And this, too, in 
face of the fact that there is a vast deal of wooden- 
mindedness among the so-called orthodox that 
makes Christianity a parody instead of a planet- 
shaking power. Nevertheless, when ministers are 
so “modern” that they are more eager to fit Jesus 
into contemporary mental molds—whether psycho- 
logic, philosophic, or theologic—than they are to 
proclaim Him as the God-Man no molds can con- 
tain, is there not such a loud-mouthed response on 
the part of the sheer humanitarians and ethical 


theorists and hotel cultusts as to make one question 


the wisdom of overmuch modernity in this matter? 
I respect both the humanists and the apostles of 
ethics; they are usually more attractive than dry- 
as-dust dogmatists. Yet, after appraising all their 
high qualities, they are hopelessly blind in one eye 
when reporting their vision and conception of 
Christ. However brilliant their intellects, they are 
astonishingly dull and commonplace in heart and 
soul. They seem to think that the universe is a big 
ice pond which can be easily negotiated with a fine 
pair of mental skates. But there are so many holes 
in the ice these skates either ignore or laugh at! 


{ 
i 


28 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


Sin, guilt, judgment, moral accountability, the re- 
actions of an anodyned conscience suddenly come 
to life, the unplumbed depths of the soul all alive 
with the deeds of undying yesterdays—these and 
other spiritual facts as old as A%schylus and as 
modern as Shakespeare, as ancient as Babylon and 
as new as New York, are conveniently brushed 
aside to make way for up-to-date propositions. 

Well, there is nothing essentially new in this at- 
titude, my friends. Only the outward guise has 
changed. Enterprising “modern men” were all 
astir in Vesuvian Pompeii twenty centuries ago, as 
they were in Egyptian Luxor ten centuries before 
that. The yellow edition of the morning Tribune 
and the pink edition of the Evening Journal, now 
being constantly dug out of the earth in the form of 
accusing bricks, contain significant reports of men 
who, knowing God, glorified Him not as such, but 
gave themselves up to unnatural and vile passions 
which self-respecting and unfallen beasts of the 
field never indulge. And of all men, for a minister 
to give the “modern mind” the impression that all 
it needs is just a little more coaching in the elements 
of humanism, ethics, and psychology! Why, he is 
too superficial to be aware of his own shallowness, 
too publicity-poisoned to feel his own shame, too 
far gone from original righteousness to be rescued 
by any power save the redemptive passion of God 
in Christ Jesus! Here is a prayer modern men 
might pray with profit: From dry-as-dust ortho- 
doxy and bright-minded heterodoxy, Good Lord, 
deliver us! 

Furthermore, about the cheapest specimen of re- 


THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 29 


ligious imbecility in our day is this: The preacher 
who thinks that all that is wrong with the world is 
ignorance, poverty, political and social maladjust- 
ments. We know that these are terrible enough, 
and no man having either common or moral sense 
will speak lightly of these things, so flagrantly un- 
just and inhumanly wrong are they! Yet, in God’s 
name, do not the wickedly brilliant men, the richly 
selfish women, and the hopelessly rotten children of 
luxury all about us, forever discredit the modern 
delusion that mere distribution of property and 
whetting of intellectual faculties will correct the ills 
of mankind? What we all need—rich and poor, 
educated and ignorant, employer and employe, 
leaders and followers—is a new heart, a new soul, 
a new mind—even the mind which was and is in 
Christ Jesus, ‘“Who, existing in the form of God, 
counted not the being on an equality with God a 
thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking 
the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of 
men; and being found in fashion as a man, he 
humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto 
death, yea, the death of the cross.” 


Here is, indeed, the heavenly serum that can cure 
our modern world-demoniac, destroying the bacil- 
lus of sin, and causing this fierce twentieth century 
monster to forsake his ferocity as he goes, trans- 
formed and in his right mind, about the world-task 
of Jesus and the men and women He has Christed 
through and through. 


II 


INVISIBLE BILLS FOR INTANGIBLE 
DEBIS * 


“Pay what thou owest.’—Matruew 18: 28. 


P SHE Master’s ability to make the material dis- 
close the spiritual is inexhaustibly full and 
fresh. He talks of sheep, and instantly the 

shepherd care of God is exposed. He talks of 
money, and the value of money is quickly sub- 
merged in the value of man. He talks of a build- 
ing, and we are soon thinking of the “house not 
made with hands.” He talks of lilies, and we con- 
sider not only how they grow, but how worlds grow 
also. He talks of sparrows, and never again can 
men forget that the seemingly insignificant is big 
with the beauty of the divine. He talks of bread, 
and, half unconsciously, our souls begin to feed 
upon the Bread of Life. 

Thus, in the parable from which our text is taken, 
Jesus makes a material: debt declare those infinite 
spiritual obligations everywhere imposed upon hu- 
man beings. A man, says the Master, owed his lord 
the sum of ten million dollars. The man, unable 
to pay and pleading for mercy, finds his vast indebt- 
edness graciously cancelled. But a fellow-servant 
owes this same man the paltry sum of seventeen 


ie Peace at Union Services of Methodist and Presbyterian Churches, 
Chazy, New York, August 24, 1924. 


30 


INVISIBLE BILLS 31 


dollars. Quickly forgetting how generously he has 
been treated by his lord, the rascally ingrate seizes 
his own debtor by the throat, saying, “Pay what 
thou owest.” Thence the Master immediately 
passes from the material to the spiritual, from the 
temporal to the eternal. So does He present, to 
each of us, our invisible bills for intangible debts. 
Likewise, I wish to seize you, not by the throat— 
although I like the thrill of spiritual energy the 
figure suggests—but by the intellect, the will, the 
imagination, the conscience, and make you aware 
of some of these tremendous debts which cannot be 
paid by any coin of the realm, but only through the 
gold minted in the Kingdom of God. 


I 


You owe a debt of Christian Faith. We are all, 
both individuals and nations, talking lustily about 
our rights. Let me remind you of one right you 
have no right to: You have no right to go through 
this world without Christian faith—faith in God, 
faith in man, faith in yourself. 

Now, why do I speak thus? Because, to make 
the journey across the years without faith, is too 
lonely a task for any mortal to impose upon him- 
self. Such a mood brings him stark up against a 
spiritually meaningless universe. For sheer pathos 
that deepens into tragedy, Matthew Arnold’s Dover 
Beach reports the soul bereaved of faith in lines 
which long ago became a classic of spiritual despair. 
He beholds a calm sea, a full tide, a fair moon ly- 
ing upon the straits. On the French coast, the 
gleaming light comes and goes, while out in the 


32 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


tranquil bay the cliffs of England stand, glimmer- 
ing and vast. It was such a scene, Arnold thinks, 
as challenged Sophocles on the Agean centuries be- 
fore, bringing “into his mind the turbid ebb and 
flow of human misery.” Then, sings he: 


“The sea of faith 
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore 
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 
But now I only hear 
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
Retreating, to the breath 
Of the night-wind, down the edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world.” 


As a matter of fact, the great classicist and noble 
soul is simply voicing his own mental and spiritual 
condition at a given period. Yet Arnold also had 
his calm, clear, triumphant hours, when his bugle 
blasts of moral and religious challenge sound deep 
and golden. Witness Morality, The Buried Life, 
and Rugby Chapel. But how can we ever thank 
him enough for his royal figure, ‘“The sea of faith!” 
For faith is like a vast, invisible sea, forever full, 
forever flowing. All any mortal has to do is to 
become a spiritual plumber, lay his spiritual pipes, 
tap the infinite, and turn on the faucet. Then a 
pressure, as real as the Atlantic behind the water 
pouring through every main, comes throbbing and 
beating into our spiritual pulses, cleansing our out- 
looks and aspirations, even as the roots of our 
deeper selves are watered by the eternal tides of 
God. 

The other day I went with some friends to that 
wonderful Cold Spring, which is one of the many 


INVISIBLE BILLS 33 


glories of Heart’s Delight Farm. There it is, far 
back from the highway, very close, indeed, to the 
edge of the wilderness itself. What romance 
gathers about that secluded spring! It is ages and 
ages old. Think of the wild animals, before civili- 
zation began, gathering about that cool, liquid 
splendor and slaking their thirst! Think of the In- 
dians, wild and nimble as the deer, who also knew 
its haunting draughts, coming at morning, midday, 
and midnight to quench their thirst!) Think of the 
long-vanished settlers and pioneers—your ancestral 
great-grandfathers—who likewise knelt, drank, and 
went on refreshed about their long, lonely tasks! 
Long ago their bodies became level with the dust of 
these mountains, and even their children’s children 
have gone the mysterious way of the unreturning. 
And yet Cold Spring flows coolly on! Why, if its 
waters were kissed by the lips of ice, they would be 
but slightly cooler and no purer at all. And yet, 
‘Cold Spring—calm, deep, sweet, refreshing — 
calmly waits to quench all the fires of thirst, raging 
in animals and humans that set their yearning lips 
to its bubbling coolness. Coming in out of the heat 
and strife of the struggle for existence, all alike 
have their thirstiness kissed away by the generous 
waters of haunting, century-old Cold Spring. 

So, likewise, “the sea of faith’ is inexhaustibly 
full. The Christ of God has His own Cold Spring 
for every mortal. “Whosoever shall drink of the 
water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but 
the water that I shall give him shall become in him 
a well of water springing up into eternal life.’ We 


neglect this water, at our peril; we drink it to our 
§3 


34 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


utmost satisfaction. All other drinks spoil upon 
the taste—the liquor of lust, the champagne of wan- 
tonness, the wine of pleasure, the beaker of selfish- 
ness. One morning at the close of a service a cul- 
tured, beautiful woman came to the minister and 
thanked him for his message. Her face was like an 
April shower, and, therefore, her words were 
sweetly watered with tears. “You have put a soul 
into life,” she said. Ah, what a sermon! I shall 
remember it long after most sermons are forgotten. 
Putting a soul into life—that is what Christian faith 
does. And is not this one of the profoundest needs 
we humans have? So much of life seems to be 
utterly soulless. The whence and the whither of 
things—the whys and the wherefores of being! Do 
not these problems sometimes threaten to turn our 
years into a waterless, songless waste stretching be- 
tween the two eternities? And then—ah, then—if 
happily we know the sure, silent, sylvan paths that 
lead straight to the ever-flowing wells of God, we 
kneel and find that upgushing spring which “puts a 
soul into life.” 

The object of religion, according to Arnold, is 
conduct, and “conduct is three-fourths of life.” 
Moreover, he says, “the true meaning of religion is 
thus not simply morality, but morality touched by 
emotion.’ But what or who, let me ask, is to touch, 
and not merely touch, but discipline emotion? Can- 
didly, has not our Christian faith the deepest and 
most disciplinary spring of emotion yet uncovered 
to men? ‘That spring is not a theory, nor a philos- 
ophy, nor a definition, nor a theology; it is Jesus 
the Christ—the very roots of the Godhead thrust 


_ INVISIBLE BILLS 35 


through and hanging over the walls of matter, so 
that mind, humanized, in its simplest and sublimest 
manifestations, may be grafted into the True Vine 
of God, producing spiritual fruits so rich, varied, 
and beautiful that new clusters of Christian love- 
liness continuously appear in the Gardens of Time. 
The Christian faith does not ask you to feed upon 
a creed, but upon the Eternal Christ. Not often 
did Jesus ask the disciples to define Him; very 
often did He yearningly plead with them to obey, 
experience, and love Him. Definitions may or may 
not lead us into the psychological complex of verbal 
logomachy; but love and duty and goodwill lead us 
into the soul of That which the litanies and ora- 
torios strive in vain to tell. Words are too empty 
to express the full grandeur of Morality; but, after 
all, is not Browning grandly right? 


“Morality to the uttermost 
Supreme in Christ, as we all confess, 
Why need we prove, would avail no jot 
To make Him God, if God He were not? 
Where is the point where Himself lays stress? 
Does the precept run, “Believe in good, 
_ In justice, truth, now understood 
For the first time ?’—or, ‘Believe in Me, 
Who lived and died, yet essentially 
Am Lord of Life?” 


Down the road this morning—somewhere be- 
tween Lake Champlain and these wheat fields of bil- 
lowing gold—I met a boy with a bucket of milk. I 
soon got into a conversation with him—so irresist- 
ible was he, with his wholesome ways and morning 
face. I asked him what he was going to do with his 


36 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


milk. Thinking, perhaps, that he had fallen in with 
a dunce, he said: “I’m going to drink it.” Now, 
suppose I had told him, before he drank his milk, 
that he must commit to memory this definition, else 
he could not adequately and philosophically enjoy 
the bovine constituents composing the contents of 
his pail! “Milk: A white or yellowish fluid se- 
creted by the mammary glands of female mammals 
for the nourishment of their young, consisting of 
minute globules of fat suspended in a solution 
chiefly of casein and other proteid matters, milk 
sugar and inorganic salts.” 

Well, I didn’t read the boy that definition; there 
was no ambulance near, and I fear he might not 
have survived the shock! But I did give him a 
coin and asked what he was going to do with it. 
“Why,” said he, “I’m going to buy candy, of 
course!’ Certainly! What a dull, stupid preacher- 
man I was to ask such a foolish question! Coins, 
candy, and boys gravitate toward each other, and 
then swiftly part, with a sureness quite their own. 
Now, there is a divine candy which may be had for 
the coin of faith. But you must mint the coin your- 
self, if you would greatly enjoy the fresh, new- 
made things of God. The old mintings—the other 
mintings—are good; but, strangely wise, they are 
not good enough for you, or me, or any other mor- 
tal. This is why I say you owe the immortal debt 
of Christian faith. It is individual, personal, in- 
volving you in social, commercial, national, and re- 
ligious obligations which may not be ignored. 
Therefore, by the love of Christ, I send you this in- 


INVISIBLE BILLS 37 


visible bill for your intangible debt of Christian 
faith. “Pay what thou owest.” 


II 


You owe a debt, also, of Christian Vision. I 
first wrote that “world vision’; but the original 
adjective, I am convinced, is deeper, more vital, 
more inclusive. The world, Wordsworth thought, 
is too much with us; it is certainly with us today, 
so far as time and distance are concerned, on a 
scale the seer little dreamed of. I was in San Fran- 
cisco when Maughan made his new world-record 
trip from coast to coast. In considerably less than 
twenty-four hours he flew from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific, dropping out of the air at nightfall into the 
City by the Golden Gate like some strange, space- 
dazzled bird from the star-spangled heavens. Since 
then, Maughan has ridden his mechanical Pegasus 
to the home of his venerable father, who celebrated 
the fiftieth anniversary of his settling somewhere 
in Utah. Think of it! Only fifty years ago the 
elder Maughan drove westward with his ox-cart, 
building his crude home in the wilderness. Long, 
lonely months did he trudge through the barren 
wastes before reaching his haven. And now the 
son, borne upon whizzing wings of wonder and 
traveling twice as far, starts from New York in 
the morning and dines with his pioneering father 
on the same day. If the father awoke the wolves 
as he jogged along with his ox-team, I think the 
son must have excited the angels as he went wheel- 
ing under their starlit floor with his airplane! 


38 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


Thus, concretely, are we made aware of the mov- 
ing in of the ends of the earth upon each other. 
Consequently, Asia is now much closer to America 
than was Washington to the Boston of our fore- 
fathers. Surveying the universe itself, we are 
amazed at its vastnesses even as we are overwhelmed 
by its smallnesses. The sun, as compared with the 
earth, is of gigantic proportions; and yet the sun 
is small in the presence of millions of worlds com- 
posing our own and other universes. The shores 
of space sparkle with stars as countless as the shores 
of the Atlantic sparkle with sands on a brilliant 
day in June. And now, also, to bigness men are 
compelled to annex the awe and mystery of small- 
ness. For is not the atom as bewildering as the 
constellation? Growing up before our eyes, says 
Sir Oliver Lodge, is an atomic astronomy, causing 
thinkers to wonder whether there is any limit to 
littleness any more than there is to bigness. 

And yet, in the presence of the infinitely large 
and the infinitely small, Christian vision may stand 
unabashed. ‘The scholar reminds us that Mount 
Everest is certain to be conquered because man con- 
tinues to grow while the mountain does not. The 
fact is, the insignificant ant, on any worthy scale 
of values, is greater than the mountain; for the 
ant is alive with intelligence, while the mountain is 
dead with unfeeling inertness. So man, in the 
illimitable systems of matter, is profoundly signifi- 
cant in that he is the center of thought, will, faith, 
and vision. Consider his lowly physical beginnings. 
Like every bodily organism, man begins his aston- 
ishing journey through the cosmos as a microscopic 


INVISIBLE BILLS | 39 


speck of matter, the physical basis of life. Gazing 
upon that speck of germ plasm, in its awful glory, 
the most powerful microscope cannot disclose 
whether it will turn out to be a Plato or a pig, a 
Shakespeare or a shark, a Beethoven or a baboon. 
But never fear! What the microscope searches for 
in vain, the living God has already definitely pre- 
determined; and, therefore, the universe could 
wreck itself more certainly than that bit of matter, 
teeming with intelligent purpose, could fail of be- 
coming the philosopher, the poet, or the creator of 
harmonies. 

Now, this Power has been given the name of 
Fatherhood. Luminous souls are gripped and 
steadied by the Christlikeness of the Eternal every- 
where thinking and working and loving amid His 
worlds. Is it not unthinkable that this mighty 
scheme of things could have moved blindly up out 
of the firemist to its present awe-inspiring propor- 
tions? Moreover, it is quite as unthinkable that, 
having come so far, the Power not ourselves mak- 
ing for righteousness will not carry everlastingly 
on until He, Himself, is conscious that the whole 
is tuned to His own conception of completeness. 
What that conception is, I think all the high- 
powered imaginations functioning in the fields of 
time, if they could become tangible, stretched out 
and laid end to end, would not be long enough to 
measure more than a small proportion of its 
grandeur. That is why the Master says, caught as 
we are within our far-stretching wildernesses of 
difficulty, ‘““Have faith in God.” ‘Think you that 
our Lord was unaware of the hells of sin raging 


40 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


throughout the worlds and the zons? Think you 
that death slipped up on Him and waylaid the 
Lord of Glory? ‘No man,” said He, “taketh My 
life from Me. I have power to lay it down, and 
I have power to take it again.’”’ He exhibited that 
power here on the fields of history. More amazing 
still, He has thrust His death-defying, life-giving 
consciousness into the hearts of millions. And this, 
I think, is the most satisfying treatise on immor- 
tality men can have. I like to read Socrates and 
Aurelius and Kant. They stir up a healthy verbal 
dust that quite adequately envelopes infidels and 
atheists, mercifully hiding them from our intellectual 
gaze. But after all the arguments are in, I think 
this is the best one, “I know Him Whom I have 
believed.” Is it not just the apostolic rendering of 
the Master’s own words, ‘“This is life eternal, that 
they may know Thee, the only true God, and Him 
Whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.” 
Thus, I affirm, Christian vision is for use here 
and now. It is not a talent we are to lazily lay 
away in a moth-eaten, creedal napkin in the hope 
of finding it again somewhere in distant realms. 
By paying our debt of Christian vision, which is 
deeper and more redemptive than our so-called 
world vision, we receive authority to do business 
with Heaven while we are on the way. Last night 
I read some lines that fairly haunted me with their 
beauty. ‘This morning, down in the clover fields, 
I read them again. I think they have a freshness 
that matched the dewdrops glistening on the pink 
domes of the clover. Moreover, I picked up these 
little wild flowers, almost leaning against each other, 


INVISIBLE BILLS 41 


each having a different shape and color, reminding 
one of Keats’ exclamation, “How beautiful are 
the retired flowers!’ I have placed them here amid 
the fragrance of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. 
The morning, the flowers, and the poem belong in 
the same bundle of beauty. 


“The streets of heaven, I’ve been told, 
Are paved with bricks of solid gold; 


The gates are all of precious stone, 
And poverty’s a thing unknown; 


No thunder-showers enter there, 
For every day is dazzling fair. 


Yet, strangely, I have never heard 
A flower mentioned, or a bird; 


And I’m quite sure that I would tire 
Of playing on a golden lyre. 


So, if there’s room, along the walks 
I think [ll plant some hollyhocks ; 


And soon as they begin to grow 
I’ll tend them with a golden hoe. 


If Gabriel should pass my way, 
I’m certain he’d sit down and stay.” 


Is not Christian vision, a pressing, invisible bill 
for one of our vast, intangible debts? ‘Pay what 
thou owest.” 


Iil 


Another debt you owe is fidelity to intelligent 
Christian Conviction. In a world like ours, the 
necessity of honorable compromise is everywhere 


42 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


apparent. Woodrow Wilson was both a writer and 
maker of history. “In no case,’ says Wilson the 
historian, “can you do more than convey an im- 
pression, so various and complex is the matter.’ 
Thus, no day dawns for any of us in which prob- 
lems do not arise that ask for wise compromise. 
Without it, we could scarcely live in home, shop, 
office, or school room, so various and complex are 
the matters constantly demanding our attention. 
Hence that noble plea of Voltaire for heroic toler- 
ance, “I wholly disagree with what you say; but 
I would defend to the death your right to say it.” 

Yet there is a decisive limit to the spirit of com- 
promise. ‘The hour comes when every soul must 
take its stand for the right as God gives each soul 
to see the right. And is not that a holy, solemn 
hour indeed? Its loneliness would be unendurable 
were it not for the living God at the center of such 
a tremendous, white-hot experience, to guide and 
sustain. But the experience is worth all that it 
costs. ‘Talk about the revelation of God in star or 
atom or mountain or sea! I tell you such revela- 
tions are tame when studied in the light of those 
souls pressed back against an invisible wall of flam- 
ing truth and crying, “Here I stand. God helping 
me, I can do no other!’ Then all that Nature tried 
to say and could not, becomes vocal with fused 
conviction and intelligence; out of the core of 
reality they burn a splendor across the ages; and 
history is never quite the same after such souls have 
come and spoken their word and done their deed 
and grandly returned into That out of which high 
deeds and true words have their birth. 


INVISIBLE BILLS Pine’ k 


Consider Jesus before and during His so-called 
trial. We see Him, first, in the garden over the 
Kidron with His disciples. Thither come the sol- 
diers and Judas, from chief priests and Pharisees, 
to arrest Him. They are armed against the Un- 
armed; they carry lanterns and torches to seek the 
Light of the World. Asked whom they sought, 
they replied, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Just here is 
recorded one of the most amazing outbursts of pure 
moral majesty the world can ever know. ‘‘When 
therefore He said unto them, I am He, they went 
backward and fell to the ground.’ If we are 
seriously interested in the higher kinds of power 
released within the worlds, I think we may set this 
down as supreme. How puny, in the last analysis, 
does crude physical might appear in the presence 
of pure moral heat and spiritual flame! Even that 
horrible midnight among the olive trees becomes 
luminous for an instant with a splendor surpassing 
the light of rising and setting suns. 

Oh, I wonder, what that Power was which made 
those misguided men tremble and quail and falter 
and fall? I think it was none other than the Power 
that gives the morning stars their song; that lends 
the seas their tides; that imparts to mountains their 
majesty; that colors the Spring with green and the 
winter with white; that takes a drop of water— 
the very same kind of water you find in sea and 
rain and. dew—sets it in emotional relations to the 
human soul, and lo! that drop of water becomes 
a tear, the wordless language of the heart when the 
tongue is bereft of the power of speech! 

Moreover, I think it is the selfsame Power that 


44 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


smote Abraham with his faith; that kindled Moses 
with his morality; that enraptured Isaiah with his 
vision; that enchanted David with his psalmody; 
that sublimed John with his Gospel; that greatened 
Paul with his ministry. Yea, I think it is the very 
Power that sweetened the heart of Homer, so that 
he sang like a human nightingale in the early morn- 
ing of the world; the Power that fit Dante’s 
rhythmic feet into their flame-shot path; the Power 
that lifted great Shakespeare to the high hills of 
life, that he might see and tell the vast human 
dramas being enacted down in the valleys thereof; 
the Power that gave Handel his harmonies, and 
Rodin his curves, and Newton his laws, and Rem- 
brandt his colors; the Power that fired the soul 
of Luther and Knox and Wesley and Beecher and 
Liddon; the Power that is moving this moment 
upon the face of our international deep to shape 
our outgrown nationalisms into a world-order of 
justice and truth, in which militarists and war shall 
have no place under the whole heaven. 

Now, why have I thus dwelt upon this unique 
Power manifested in the Garden of Gethsemane? 
There is a valid reason for it, believe me, and here 
it is: “Jesus therefore, knowing all the things that 
were coming upon Him, went forth.’ Up to this 
moment, His time had not yet come. But now His 
hour is striking from the clock of eternity. He 
must go forth from the shadow of the trees and 
face the darker shadows over the souls of men. 
And so, knowing all the things that were coming 
upon him,—the laughter, the coarseness, the brutal- 
ity, the spitting, the injustice, the ignominy, the 


INVISIBLE BILLS 45 


suffering and death; knowing, also, that third-day 
dawn of resurrection and glory, flinging out a sal- 
vation for men that angels desire to look into— 
knowing all things that were coming upon Him, 
when He said unto them, I am He, they went back- 
ward and fell to the ground! 

Here, then, is the result of fidelity to intelligent 
Christian conviction in its original and transcendent 
aspects. But it does not stop there. Wherever, in 
Church or State, men and women practice a similar 
spirit, are they not paying down, in spiritual and 
intellectual cash, one of our huge invisible bills for 
great intangible debts? Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, 
in her brilliant book, tells of an incident at one of 
the City Hall hearings in New York. Mother 
Jones had said something complimentary to John 
D. Rockefeller, Jr. “I’m afraid you flatter me, 
Mother Jones,’ the rich man replied. “I don’t 
throw bouquets,” she retorted, “I am more used 
to throwing bricks.” Well, in a world like ours, 
I think both bricks and bouquets have their place! 
On another occasion, Mother Jones said to Mrs. 
Harriman: “You can’t do anything worth while 
till you get over minding what people say.” Mrs. 
Harriman confesses, inasmuch as minding what 
people say had always been one of her besetting 
sins, her indebtedness to the plain-speaking woman. 
And is not “minding what people say” one of the 
sneaking, besetting sins of most of us? Perchance 
some of us carry the spirit of compromise so far 
that we smother the feeble fires of conviction before 
they have the opportunity of thoroughly catching 
and burning up the dross and stubble piled high 


46 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


upon the grates of our. smooth, insipid conven- 
tionalisms. Fidelity to intelligent Christian convic- 
tion is one of your unpaid debts. ‘Pay what thou 
owest.” For, in paying off such debts, the morally 
incomprehensible becomes strangely clear. Thus 
is there reality as well as poetry in the words: 


“And fierce though the fiends may fight, 
And long though the angels hide, 
I know that Truth and Right 
Have the universe on their side.” 


IV 


Most of all, perhaps, you owe a debt of Christian 
Forgiveness. Our study began in the scriptures of 
forgiveness, and, quite properly, it must end there. 
Are we not frequently indebted to Peter for start- 
ing something nobly worth while? He may not 
have the slightest idea as to where he will fetch 
up on the road of discussion; nevertheless, he 
makes such amazing starts that the finish, under 
the Master’s guidance, is all that could be desired. 
When Peter set the limit of forgiveness at seven 
times, he outdistanced the rabbinical code more than 
half; for the rabbis thought asking forgiveness 
three times was enough. As we know, the Master 
pitches the scale, in His picturesque way, to the 
mathematics of infinity. “TI say not unto thee, Until 
seven times; but, Until seventy times seven.” 

‘Now, why do mortals owe this momentous debt 
of forgiveness? First of all, to help God. God 
Himself cannot forgive the unforgiving. The heart 
that refuses hospitality to the very soul of forgive- 
ness ties the hands of Omnipotence. For at this 


INVISIBLE BILLS 47 


point manhood moves up into a realm merging into 
the moral genius of Godhood. God can compel all 
physical forces and energies to do His bidding; but 
can God compel man—man being what he is—to 
do His will, without destroying the ethical meaning 
of His Fatherhood and fatally wounding, also, the 
sense of human sonship? I do not see how He can. 
If man were a thing, belonging solely to the cate- 
gory of stars and plants and beasts, the problem 
would be comparatively simple. But endowed as 
he is with mind, man asserts a kind of moral sover- 
eignty over the Infinite, even tragically and patheti- 
cally limiting the Illimitable. What a universe of 
spiritual majesty and mystery is disclosed in the 
petition of the prayer, “Our Father, forgive us our 
debts, even as we have forgiven our debtors!” 
Until the spirit of forgiveness is actively at work 
in the heart—however wondrously the grace of God 
in Christ may create and direct it—I repeat: God 
Himself is morally handicapped in completing the 
work of forgiveness—one of the grandest and most 
difficult of all moral achievements. 

The principle involved is familiar enough in our 
human world. For example: You are a father; 
you desire the education of your son; you send him 
to college. But without your son’s enthusiastic 
cooperation, neither you nor his instructors nor all 
the libraries and laboratories can make him a 
scholar. You provide the conditions, and he must 
do the rest. So, somewhat, is it with our Heavenly 
Father. He not only creates the conditions and 
atmosphere of forgiveness; He also generates the 
spiritual power that makes it possible. Yet I must 


48 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


tap the power, turn it on, by my own faith and 
initiative, thus helping God in His redemptive won- 
ders. 

Second: We owe the debt of forgiveness to help 
our own selves. Call it enlightened self-interest, 
spiritual selfishness, if you choose; but no mortal 
can afford, in defense of his own soul, to withhold 
the spirit of forgiveness. Out of their own experi- 
ence, ministers can tell you, when at close and 
solemn grips with this matter, of being brought 
very near to fires more terrible than medieval brim- 
stone. Witnessing the lurid flames of hate destroy- 
ing the innermost foundations of justice and hu- 
manity in a soul, their final plea has been: “For 
your own sake, if not for God’s or man’s, cast off 
this venomous snake of hatred coiled about the 
vitals of your being!’ And sometimes, thank God, 
this plea has proven effectual, when all others 
seemed of no avail. 

Third: We owe the debt of forgiveness to help 
other selves. The forgiving heart moves down the 
ways of men like a clean, bracing wind singing 
across the world. Sometimes we enter a close-shut 
room; the air is stifling; we feel as if we would 
smother. ‘Then we run up the blinds, open the 
windows and doors, and lo! the morning and the 
sea and the dews and the songs of birds all start 
for that stuffy room on their invisible tides of 
oxygen! Nor is it otherwise when a cool, deep, 
radiant, good-willed personality moves royally about 
the house of living men. Feeling his Christian 
vitality, they, too, begin to religiously pulse and 
quiver and glow. ‘What is it?’ men ask, as they 


INVISIBLE BILLS 49 


feel his presence. There may be many answers— 
moral, philosophical, psychological, theological, and 
otherwise. But the best answer, I think, is this: 
The Christ of God, in the Holy Spirit, has been 
allowed to come in, make Himself at home, and 
have His glorious way with this strong and beauti- 
ful soul. And this is the secret of his moving like 
a sweet, fertilizing wind across our human ways, 
reminding us of calm stars and great hills and silken 
seas and vast horizons and Heaven and Christ and 
God. 

I have a young friend in Chicago who had a lost 
little girl wished upon him one day. Coming into 
contact with a lost child, you know, spells one of 
those moral obligations we dare not sidestep; we 
must face it, no matter how important other matters 
seem to be. This child thought that her mother was 
in the Community House near by; but the youth 
soon found that his ward was mistaken. After 
looking around for sometime without results, the 
boy got his car, took the child in with him, and 
drove around from home to home, at last finding 
the child’s own home. As he left, the little girl 
said: “Say, Big Boy, when I get lost again, will 
you come and find me?’ And we are always get- 
ting lost—we older children—in the sinuous moral 
ways and bewildering spiritual mazes of life. Our 
Elder Brother has often found us and taken us 
tenderly back home to God. He still is out upon 
His errands of recovery. His chariots of salva- 
tion are abroad in every highway of being, and 
there is abundant room for every wanderer. 

Speaking of the seasons, a friend wrote me: 

4 


50 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


“The Junes and Julys are of the earth earthly. 
They have form and color—they riot and fade; 
but October is the spiritual substance of the whole 
year. It is not form, nor fragrance, nor color, but 
essence. Past and future meet in one rapturous 
now—a morn that fulfills more than hope ever 
promised.” So, as Christ’s minister, I am sending 
you these invisible bills for your intangible debts. 
Discharge them, by the grace of God, and you shall 
have the thrill and sense and awe of the Christian 
morning—“a morn that fulfills more than hope ever 
promised.” “Pay what thou owest.” In going 
about our many-colored task, I think Walter Byn- 
ner’s lines on “Lorenzo” will remind us of what a 
big, strange, glorious world we are in, offering 
joys to people we look upon as joyless, holding com- 
pensations for those whom we are sometimes 
tempted to call even our enemies: 


“T had not known that there could be 

Men like Lorenzo and like me 

Both in the world, and both so right 

That the world is dark and the world is light. 
I had not thought that any one 

Would choose the dark for dwelling on, 
Would dig and delve for the bitterest roots 
Of sweetest and suavest fruits. 

Though I had neither been a fool 

Nor won a scholarship at school, 

I never once had dared to doubt 

That now and then the light went out; 

But I had not known that there could be 
Men like Lorenzo and like me 

Both in the world, and both so right 

That the world is dark and the world is light. 
I had not guessed that joy could be 

Selected for an enemy.” 


BUT 
ASPECTS OF THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL* 


“So then with the mind . . . serve the law of God.” 
—Romans 7:25, 


HE purpose of education is the unfolding 
of the Mind. Next to the being of God 
Himself, here is the wonder that outtops all 
wonders—the evolution of the human mind. In 
discussing the purposeful aspect of education, we 
should remember, first, the premise of Aristotle, 
that there is nothing in the end which was not also 
present in kind in the beginning, and, second, the 
conclusion of J. Arthur Thomson, that “by no 
jugglery of words can we get Mind out of Matter 
and Motion.” Thus convoyed by the noble past 
and the living present, we may go on to reflect upon 
the grandeur of the unfolding mind as it is inter- 
preted by the best education of the world. 


I 


Consider, first, how Mind is always stemming 
the tide of Matter to build a home for itself. This 
consideration did not much trouble the ancient, far- 
away man. Like the majority of his descendants, 
he had not been bitten by the curative teeth of 
thought. To him the world was a kind of cozy 





“Commencement Address at Vanderbilt University, June 13, 1925. 
51 


52 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


corner, in one small part of which he slept tonight, 
and on the morrow struck his tent, which he pitched 
otherwhere with each successive nightfall. But 
with the dawn of the Greek mind some twenty-five 
centuries ago, man.began to report his reflections 
upon the mystery of Matter. And he has been at 
it ever since—so awful, so profound, so unfathom- 
able is this stuff which universally leans upon Spirit, 
which is somehow the elusive child of Mind. We 
are indebted to those early Greeks for the atomic 
conception of Matter. Now, an atom is said to 
be a million times smaller than the breadth of a 
hair. Armed with the most powerful microscope, 
no man has ever seen an atom. Yet the founda- 
tions of the universe are built of atomic bricks, or 
electronic grains of sand, if you desire a suggestion 
of overwhelming infinitesimal proportions. For if 
a molecule is a microscopic house of which atoms 
are the bricks, is not an atom a super-microscopic 
house of which electrons are the invisible stones? 

What I am trying to say is this: All editions of 
Matter, large or small, simple or complex, are but 
the clothing of Mind, according to Plato and Kant 
and Bergson. Or, recurring to Aristotle’s concept, 
all that comes out in the end as Matter was in at 
the beginning as Mind. 

Now, are we not ready to appreciate, somewhat, 
the long road the Divine Mind has traveled that He 
might build a home for the habitation of the human 
mind? ‘The process, which has been in operation 
from the genesis of life, is, first, the action of the 
external world upon simple creatures; second, 
the reaction of simple creatures to the external 


THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 53 


world; third, according to the efficiency of ac~- 
tions and reactions, living creatures have been 
sifted through the cycles of time. It is at once evi- 
dent, therefore, that the preparation for our human 
beginnings are far back—zonianly back! But even 
behind the preparation is the purpose of the Infinite 
Mind to unfold Himself in million-toned variation, 
it may be, but with one increasing goal—the produc- 
tion of a flesh-and-blood home in which the human 
mind may be palatially housed. Thus do we behold 
the Infinite steadily stemming the tide of Matter— 
rising through instinct, intelligence, reason, speech, 
until at last self-expression stands forth in human 
majesty and says: “I think; therefore, I am.” 
Now, so far as our human part of the universe 
is concerned, that was the beginning of man’s im- 
perial moods and epochs. But did it not also flash 
forth the purpose of education—the unfolding of 
the human mind? Thrust forward out of the 
eternities by the I AM THAT I AM, man Says to the 
earth, as he boards his wonder-loaded ship sailing 
furiously through the spaces: “I AM hath sent me 
unto you.” Moreover, in that wondrous hour when 
man exclaimed, “I think; therefore, I am,” was 
not man invited to peer over the abyss of the Infinite 
through his own finite being? For man never gets 
to the end of himself; man never gets to the 
top of himself; man never gets to the center of 
himself; man never gets to the bottom of him- 
self. Therefore, all true education reckons not 
only with the unfolded mind, for most of us can 
expose our unfolded mentality in terms of gro- 
tesquely “eloquent ignorance’; but all education 


54 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


worthy of the name reckons with the unfolding 
mind—that which discloses great realms opening 
upon ever greater realms; golden doors swinging 
wide that other golden doors may swing wider still; 
peaks flushed with dawns prophetic of still loftier 
peaks and lovelier dawns. Is not the immortal 
sonnet of Keats an illustration of the spirit of edu- 
cation? Surely, George Chapman has been abun- 
dantly compensated for his arduous toil in trans- 
lating Homer by these fourteen deathless lines of 
Keats, who, unable to read Greek himself, has been 
pronounced the purest Greek spirit in English 
literature. 


“Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, 
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; 
Round many western islands have I been 

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demense: 
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene 

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: 
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
When a new planet swims into his ken; 

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men 

Looked at each other with a wild surmise— 
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” 


So, guided by our educational Homers and Chap- 
mans, we travel much in realms of intellectual gold, 
see many goodly states and kingdoms of the mind, 
only to feel like some Barnard when a new planet 
of truth reports itself, or like some Columbus of 
the soul before whose eyes Atlantics and Pacifics of 
reality unroll everlastingly. Then, indeed, because 


THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL — 55 


our mental mountains are so high and our spiritual 
Pacifics are so deep, our mood is properly moulded 
to the majesty of silence, as we, too, gaze with a 
wild surmise upon our own peak in Darien. 

Is it not a kindred mood we discover in the 
familiar words of Sir Isaac Newton? Dying, the 
great scientist said he was like a child picking up 
shells here and there on the seashore, while before 
him stretched the boundless and unplumbed ocean 
of truth. What, I ask, are his discovery of the 
binomial theorem, the method of tangents and 
fluxions, his investigations of the nature of light, 
his construction of telescopes, or even his discovery 
of the law of universal gravitation—what are they 
all in the presence of this greatly educated human 
being, whose unfolded capacities are but large hints 
of the unfolding powers which are still at work in 
those vast realms where Mind is unclogged by 
Matter ? 

I think, just now, of Edward Emerson Barnard. 
Simon Newcomb first saw Barnard in Nashville in 
1877. “It would have taken more prescience than 
I was gifted with,” says Newcomb, “to expect that 
I should live to see the bashful youth awarded the 
gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for 
his work.” ‘The only time I ever saw Dr. Barnard 
was on this platform twenty-seven years ago. But 
I shall never forget his face nor the letters he wrote 
me—one in particular about Adelaide Proctor’s 
The Lost Chord, beginning, ‘‘Seated one day at the 
organ.” 

Wonderful indeed is an organ! Touched by 
a master’s hand, the keys release sounds which are 


56 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


the noblest speech of the soul. Yet what is an 
organ compared to the brain, or the brain to the 
thinker who masterfully uses his delicately wrought 
instrument? Well, one fact that convinced me of 
Doctor Barnard’s genuine education was this: He 
grew to the last day of his life, richly unfolding 
his mental and moral powers, prelusive of refinding 
those “lost chords” which are gathered up and per- 
fectly harmonized in the Soul of Infinite Love. 
Therefore, I think of him in the words of Francis 
Thompson : 

“Starry amorist, starward gone, 

Thou art—what thou didst gaze upon! 


Passed through thy golden garden’s bars, 


Thou seest the Gardener of the Stars. 
* he PH * * * * *k 


When thy hand its tube let fall, 
Thou found’st the fairest Star of all!” 


Moreover, if, etymologically speaking, education 
means to draw out, let us ask: Does Mind, in stem- 
ming! the tide of Matter, become more mind? Per- 
haps yes, perhaps no. But that is a question capable 
of leading us into a psychologic labyrinth more in- 
tricate than that of Daedalus, and from which no 
devoted Ariadne could hope to rescue us. What we 
do know is this: Mind, in the highest embodiment 
we know, becomes humanized; and the highest 
humanization of Mind seems to suggest that all of 
its hidden wealth can never be entirely disclosed or 
led out. 

Herein lies further evidence, it seems to me, that 
all valid education must have to do with the prop- 
osition of an unfolding mind rather than an un- 


THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 57 


folded mind. As this is not an academic matter, 
nor a subject to be wholly confined to the expert— 
who has been described as a man a long distance 
from home—consider how the most competent 
minds shed a kindly, inspiring light upon this idea. 
Angelo disimprisoned many angels from _ the 
marble; but his mind seemed still to be the nesting 
place of unchiseled shapes of loveliness. Rem- 
brandt was a miserable financier, the courts of Hol- 
land declaring him bankrupt; but he was artistically 
solvent enough to reproduce Nature instead of the 
Italian modes of art, and his luminous shadows but 
reveal the unexhausted depths of genius still vital 
and green within his inexhaustible nature. Pascal 
invented geometry anew at the age of twelve and 
achieved renown with his celebrated treatise on 
conic sections at seventeen. Dying before he was 
forty, yet infinity seems to brood upon him, as upon 
Marpessa, and he is full of significant whispers and 
great thoughts unexpressed. As long as splendid 
mental galleons sail the seas of time, the one named 
Shakespeare must be reckoned among the stateliest 
of all. One authority says: “When or where 
Shakespeare was educated is not known.” Nor does 
it greatly matter about the “when or where’; what 
does matter is that this vastly versatile and fertiliz- 
ingly dramatic seed-man was the incarnation of so 
much humanized mind, that his fifty and two years 
of education on the earth were apparently inade- 
quate for so mighty a shepherd to lead forth more 
than a small part of his many-colored mental flock. 
This, then, is the good confession of the unfolding 
mind : 


58 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


“T am the reality of things that seem: 

The great transmuter, melting loss to gain, 
Languor to love, and fining joy from pain; 

I am the waking, who am called the dream; 
I am the sun, all light reflects my gleam; 

I am the altar fire within the fane; 

I am the face of the refreshing rain; 

I am the sea which flows to every stream; 

I am the utmost height there is to climb; 

I am the truth mirrored in fancy’s glass; 

I am stability, all else will pass; 

I am eternity, encircling time; 

Kill me, none may; conquer me, nothing can,— 
I am God’s soul, fused in the soul of man.” 


I] 


A second aspect of education may be defined as 
the process of coming to terms with life. We find 
set down in the lexicon of humanity certain great 
ineffaceable words. They are such as honor and 
dishonor, choice and mischoice, goodness and bad- 
ness, justice and injustice, morality and immorality, 
selfishness and unselfishness, ignorance and en- 
lightenment, self-seeking and self-sacrifice, false- 
hood and truth, religion and irreligion. Now, un- 
less we beg the question by asserting the predomi- 
nance of heredity and environment over our human 
world, we must believe that individualized person- 
ality, achieved and paid for in terms of will, is 
unquestionably the net result of our own actions 
within, and reactions to, the universe. I am aware 
that this viewpoint is contested by philosophic de- 
terminism, materialism, atheism, and a vulturous 
brood of other “isms.” But any education that 


THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 59 


gives more than temporary quarter to these and 
their progeny, does so at the expense of the hal- 
lowed gains agonizingly and bloodily won for us 
by uncounted ages of solid valor and lofty living. 

Just here, it seems to me, must be refought some 
of the old, old battles of moralized as contrasted 
with unmoralized scholarship. Frankly must we 
say, with Doctor Coulter, “It is unscientific to deny 
religious truth; it is irreligious to deny scientific 
truth.” Consequently, misinformed, dogmatic ig- 
norance need not engage in the fray. For ours is 
an increasingly hard world for unenlightened good- 
ness to get along in. Goodness there must be, 
white-hot and terrible in its earnestness; for with- 
out this, man is the most diabolical animal in jungle 
or sea. But it must be high-minded, faith-inspired, 
intelligent goodness—goodness in which head, 
heart, and hand function in perfect coordination; 
the quality of goodness voiced in the aspiration of 
Woodrow Wilson in which “we wish companion- 
ship and renewal of spirit, enrichment of thought 
and the full adventure of the mind; and we desire 
fair company; and a large world in which to find 
them.” 

Education implies, therefore, the coming to terms 
with life. For example, Life says, “Honor is one 
of my imperatives.”’ When a man answers, “I will 
choose dishonor,’ not even the royal endowments 
of a Bacon can protect him from the judgment of 
either himself or society. However great and 
clever, it is still true, as of Lancelot: 


“His honor rooted in dishonor stood, 
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.” 


60 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


Life says, “Another of my aphorisms is this: 
He who lives for himself will, in the end of the day, 
find a self that has not really lived at all.” And yet 
a Napoleon or a Wilhelm—to say nothing of mil- 
lions of unhistoric characters—fling these words 
back into the teeth of life, only to find imprison- 
ment upon a desolate island or exile in a foreign 
land, that every syllable of life’s words may be 
authentically confirmed. Half of the wild, discor- 
dant elements raging through our modern world 
are due to the fact that men and women have 
ignored the truth that education is the process of 
coming to terms with life; that these terms are not 
merely in the salutatory and valedictory of being, 
but that they are of its very essence, the soul of its 
argument, advancing step by step to the climax 
named life or death. It is true for all of us, as it 
is true of that “One Woman” of whom Knowles 
sings: 

“The souls of Strauss and Schubert 
Swept through the violins, 


But what cared she who danced apart— 
She, alone with her sins! 


For under the roses and diamonds, 
And back of the lips that smiled, 

Sat Memory holding the secret 
As a mother holds her child!” 


But why should we dwell overmuch on the nega- 
tive, when the positive, creative side of this truth 
pleads to be heard? Notwithstanding the mystery 
and terror of the years, countless hosts in all lands 
have come to an understanding with life and found 


THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 61 


it abundantly rewardful. It is a truism that the 
best of life escapes record; and is it not to its his- 
torically unrecorded heroes and heroines that so- 
ciety owes its existence? ‘Think of the toiling 
fathers! Think of the moiling mothers! Think of 
the faithful sons! Think of the dutiful daughters! 
Think of the teachers, preachers, editors, laborers, 
merchants, lawyers, doctors, nurses, inventors, shep- 
herds, farmers—men and women from every walk 
of the world shouldering their burdens and facing 
their tasks in the Stevensonian spirit of making 
others happier and their own selves better. 

In a quiet nook I sometimes watch the waves of 
a shallow stream divide against a stepping-stone 
placed therein to aid pedestrians in crossing. Love- 
ly, indeed, are the flowing curves wrought by those 
breaking waves—lovelier far than the most skilled 
pencil could trace. I have also seen the pattering 
drops of rain tenderly beat their liquid music out 
upon the bosom of this same secluded, shadow-hung 
brook. Each falling drop makes a perfect circle— 
a circle such as Rodin might dream of describing 
in terms of stone, or such as Mozart might long to 
define in terms of melody. Watching those circles 
made by bursting raindrops flow into each other; 
watching those flowing curves flow over the brook’s 
pebbly surface—this has afforded me many a 
rhythmic moment and left me unfading memories 
of beauty. So, into the flowing stream of Time, 
do individual human drops fall, make their tiny 
circles, the circles pass into each other, and are in 
turn taken up by the current that flows on forever 
through the checkered years. Yet I cannot forget 


62 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


the circles and curves of the brook, though they 
vanished in the moment of formation, even as the 
brook itself must soon pass away. Neither can I 
forget these white, strong, tender, and valiant hu- 
mans who, in coming to terms with life, personify 
that fine saying of George Eliot that ‘‘character is 
educated will.” | 

A third commandment of life is this: To keep 
the best we must continuously give the best away. 
This brings us to the verge of a sphere governed by 
no physical laws. “In the physical realm,” says a 
thinker, ‘any mass or velocity conveyed from one 
body to another is lost by the first body when gained 
by the second, but in the realm of mentality the 
transmission of knowledge from one individual to 
another involves no loss to the giver, however great 
the gain to the receiver.” 

Consider what the great German means by this 
law of spiritual increase. If I have two dollars and 
give you one, I have only one left. That is a 
mathematical fact, as well as a matter your banker 
will duly weigh. But if I have two thoughts and 
give you one, I still have the two thoughts myself, 
though you have received one. If I have two 
houses and sell one, I have but one left. That is 
a fact of real estate. But if I have two poems in 
my memory and give you one, you have been en- 
riched by receiving while I have been enriched by 
giving. If I have two farms and dispose of one, 
the recorder of deeds will prove to the satisfaction 
of any court that I have but one farm left. But if 
I have two good acts pulsing through my will and 
perform them on your behalf, I shall not only lose 


THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 63 


nothing, but set in motion circles and curves of 
influence lovelier than those of my sylvan brook 
and more durable than the stars which are nightly 
reflected within its quiet pool. 

Yet this, I take it, is the sphere in which the 
teacher, the reformer, the statesman, the composer, 
the missionary, the prophet, and the martyr render 
their immeasurable service to mankind. And do 
they not prove that a large part of our task consists 
in teaching people that education is the process of 
coming to terms with life? Anything short of this, 
surely, is miseducation, which cannot be atoned for 
by any efficiency, however brilliant, in physics, 
chemistry, athletics, language, philosophy, or litera- 
ture. And is it not because of the creative power 
and sustaining vigor of such an ideal that institu- 
tions like this continue their unfolding life through 
the generations? Their conclusion is that the open- 
ing up of the human mind, though a necessarily un- 
finished task because of its essential grandeur, is 
worth all that it costs in pain and patience and pur- 
pose. And the nobility of the work is such that 
each successive human generation, from Socrates 
with his Plato down to Arnold of Rugby with his 
Dean Stanley, looks back upon its teachers with 
veneration and love too deep for tears. 


{il 


A third aspect of education is the personalization 
of moral worth. Culture for its own sake may be 
good; but culture for its own sake is not good 
enough for a completely unfolding human being. 


64 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


I have all along assumed this; but this aspect of 
education is so profoundly important that it cannot 
be emphasized too often. Let us try to define our 
terms. 

What, then, do we mean by moral worth? Moral 
worth, unless life itself be a kind of idiot’s tale, is 
that which the universe has ever been struggling to 
fully spell out. We find Cicero first using the word 
moral to translate the Greek term from which we 
get our English word ethics. We may define the 
moral as the sense of right with which God has 
veined the soul of the human. But long before 
Cicero lived, Moses was wrestling with the same 
sublime fact. Nor is the thing itself confined to the 
Greek and Hebrew consciousness. Go wherever 
we choose, and the moral, very dimly, even crudely, 
it may be, is nevertheless decipherable from the 
crudest tablets of the human mind. ‘This, indeed, 
is the finding of those masterful volumes by Sir 
James Frazier, The Golden Bough. 

Secondly: What do we mean by the personaliza- 
tion of moral worth? We mean simply this: That 
until a sense of right is rooted in the human con- 
sciousness deeply enough to be the controlling 
power, Man is only, to use Tennyson’s figure, a 
cunning cast in clay, a magnetic mockery, or, at 
best, the larger ape. 

Now, to personalize this reality is the goal of 
education. And is not the method absolutely scien- 
tific? For example: There is music in the universe, 
but the musician must make it his own music by 
obeying the laws of harmony. There is beauty on 
every hand, but the artist makes it his own -beauty 


THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 65 


by complying with the rules of art. There are in- 
numerable compounds possible within the vast jar 
of Nature, but the scientist makes them his own 
by adhering to the subtle demands of chemistry. 
There is rhythm throughout the cosmos, but the 
poet makes it his own rhythm by observing the rules 
of metre and language. So, too, there is Morality 
in the universe, older than the stars, deeper than 
the seas; but a human being knows it as his morality 
only as he, by planting himself solidly upon the 
foundations of justice, mercy, and love, acts as if 
the moral were a finality, and finds it to be indeed 
that without which civilization is a veneer that god- 
less men will tear to shreds and then destroy by 
their infernal hatreds. 

Therefore, in considering the personalization of 
moral worth, we come to one of the most momen- 
tous questions our earth has ever confronted: What 
is mankind going to do with its new-found mental 
and physical powers? This, I maintain, is one of 
the most momentous questions ever asked because, 
never before, has it been possible for men to tear 
down all that Man has built up. Yet, we are told, 
by unemotional, thoroughgoing, competent men all 
over the world, that another outbreak of human 
bad temper such as we witnessed in 1914, means 
the destruction of civilization itself. If this is even 
measurably true, then our most pressing and far- 
reaching problem is the prevention and outlawry of 
war. 

And, my young friends, whether we will or no, 
this matter concerns America to the quick. It can- 
not be sidestepped by national antics patterned after 

5 


66 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


the proverbial stupidity of the ostrich. Nor can 
it be laid on the Congressional table by the incapable 
hand of tradition. Neither will it be ultimately 
hushed up and asphyxiated by political hot air, 
blowing from the partisan coasts of the high or the 
miasmatic swamps of the low. Because this is at 
once a question for the personalization of moral 
worth on the individual and national scale, consider 
the two methods by which it is proposed that the 
monster of war may be destroyed. 

There is, first, the strictly moral way—an appeal 
to the innate sense of righteousness and justice, 
which both men and nations are capable of respond- 
ing to. This is, of course, the long way, the diffhi- 
cult way, and the way most devoutly to be wished. 
But the fact is, this ideal way is impossible without 
every human will pronouncing its hearty “Amen” 
to the right it knows. Unfortunately, this nobler 
way is faced by many obstacles. One is an unideal 
world, bustling with unideal men and women— 
“even as you and I[.’”’ Another obstacle, rooted in 
the first, is designing political chicanery in the 
chancelleries of Asia, Europe, and America. A 
third obstacle is this: Human beings have been 
jostled and thrown together, in national and inter- 
national relations, by the inventive genius of the 
modern mind; therefore, the exigencies of bad 
temper are so appalling and close at hand, that our 
war-cursed world cannot possibly wait for the 
dawning of the day of the ideal. 

On the other hand, there has been conceived, 
created, and put into operation a scheme that has 
done and is doing effective work among the nations. 


THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 67 


I cannot say that this federation of more than half 
a hundred sovereign States is ideal. No! More- 
over, the honest, fair-minded, practical, humanistic 
American; the inane traditionalist, wrapped about 
in the grave-clothes of the past, as if the Almighty 
Himself died in the deaths of Washington, Adams, 
Jefferson, and Hamilton; the stand-pat, verbal 
volcanoes of no-entangling alliances, aided and 
abetted by the white-in-the-face haters of Woodrow 
Wilson—these, one and all, can readily inform us 
that the League of Nations, with its International 
Court, is not ideal. But it is at least a unique and 
auspicious beginning. In the judgment of many, it 
bids fair to succeed quite as well as did those 
Thirteen Colonies, laughed at by most of Europe, 
even while the “lucky Thirteen” were bitterly and 
scandalously quarreling among themselves as to the 
merits and demerits of the very Constitution which 
is now recognized as one of the supreme State docu- 
ments in the history of mankind. 

What irks me is this: In the eighteenth century 
it was Europe that sat in the seat of the scornful, 
jeering at what God and men were doing in this 
Western Wilderness; but, in the twentieth century, 
shall America climb into the very seat of scorn 
vacated by tottering thrones, and laugh at what God 
and men are doing, not in one nation alone, but in 
more and greater nations than ever before under- 
took to work out the political destiny of the world? 
Swear by the fathers as loudly as we may, I protest 
that such a spirit is un-American—that is, it is 
un-Washingtonian, it is un-Adamslike, it is un- 
Jeffersonian. Yet, the League seems to have within 


68 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


it the vitality of an international seed, notwith- 
standing the fact that America has done about all 
it can to kill both the sower and the seed. But, 
like the sound of infinite seas breaking upon our 
smudgy human coasts, that Old, Eternal Voice 
keeps sounding mysteriously and triumphantly on: 
“Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat 
fall into the ground and die, it abideth by itself 
alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” 

In hours of depression, men exclaim, “How 
strange that America should refuse to recognize its 
own child!’ Well, it may be unfortunate, even 
tragic, but I deny that it is altogether strange. Did 
not Athens poison her Socrates? Did not Florence 
burn her Savonarola? Did not France feed her 
Joan of Arc to the flames? Did not England hang 
even the bones of her Cromwell? Did not Jeru- 
salem crucify her Christ? It is a biographical 
axiom that it is not possible adequately to appreciate 
a truly great man in his own time. If he is unduly 
popular, universally applauded, set it down that he 
has not cut an abiding moral swath into his own 
and after times. You need not be popular to be 
great. When some of you become President of 
the United States, you need not be a professional 
hand-shaker and back-slapper in order to be known 
to coming ages. The fact is, if you are illustriously 
known in history, it will not be because you were 
popular in your own generation, but probably be- 
cause you had the courage to tell large sections of 
your generation to “Go to!’—and the law of what 
Emerson called “the gravitation of spirits” will de- 
termine the particular locality to which they must 


THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 69 


go! “All things will not be well,” said Sir Thomas 
More, “until all men are good, which I think will 
not be this long time.” Nevertheless, we are all 
human, wagons in which the generations are jolting 
along. As nations and individuals, we must not 
only learn to strike the iron while it is hot; we 
must strike the iron until it is hot. By thus exercis- 
ing our moral muscle upon the anvils of reality, 
we shall strike out sparks that will expand into orbs 
of imperishable moral beauty. 

The goal of education, then, for the world and 
the individual, is the personalization of moral 
worth. And the moral task is atmosphered with 
solemn seriousness. To be everlastingly justifying 
ourselves, developing the potential pharisee already 
house-keeping within each of us, proves many 
things, and among them this: That we are not 
wisely serious; that we are eager to be morally 
coddled; that we are unworthy of the hard-won 
gains of lofty character wrung from the heart of 
the ages; and that, finally, we are headed for the 
abyss, if we do not correct our superficial and un- 
moral attitude by sacrificial thinking and acting. 
“The gentleman of easy virtue restores our credit 
with ourselves,” says Professor Hobhouse; and is 
not “the gentleman of easy virtue’? much in request 
today? He strolls about in Church, State, Univer- 
sity, and Market Place as if he had quite forgotten 
what the guns in No Man’s Land were trying to say 
to his anodyned soul, “Both the nation and in- 
dividual that sinneth shall die.” 

Therefore, let none of us conclude, on this day, 
that solving intellectual difficulties is the final end 


70 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


of education. A man may produce an exquisite 
intellectual pattern while his personal life remains 
the shoddiest moral patchwork; indeed, he may be 
left with the feeling, as has been said of Rousseau, 
“that it is rather charming to be _ salaciously 
wicked.” ‘To make-the mental and moral colors 
match—this is the ultimate aim of education. Any- 
thing short of this, however versatile, brilliant, or 
clever, is mis-education. The truly educated human 
is a seed-human. There is within him something 
germinant and vital. More deeply than he knows, 
he lives a large, resultful life, splendid in its sug- 
gestiveness as well as definite in its achievement. 
True education enables one to wisely live in the 
Country of the Real while he journeys triumphantly 
on te the Country of the Ideal. Responding to One 
Who says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” 
he pursues his own vast and varied ways with a 
song that sings the soul and synthesis of life: 

God in the fire, 

God in the mire, 

God in the germ, 

God in the sperm, 

God in the spar, 

God in the star,— 

But God in Christ 
My soul’s own tryst. 


God in the sea, 

God in the tree, 

God in the flower, 

God in the bower, 

God in the rain, 

God in the pain,— 
But God in Christ 
My soul’s own tryst. 


God in 
God in 
God in 
God in 
God in 
God in 


THE EDUGATIONAL, IDEAL 


the air, 

the fair, 

the moon, 
the tune, 
the mole, 
the whole,— 


But God in Christ 


My soul’s own tryst. 


God in 
God in 
God in 
God in 
God in 
God in 


the gem, 
the stem, 
the thing, 
the wing, 
the loss, 
the cross,— 


But God in Christ 


My soul’s own tryst. 


God in 
God in 
God in 
God in 
God in 
God in 


the spaces, 
the faces, 

the gloom, 
the bloom, 
the shriven, 
the Heaven,— 


But God in Christ 


My soul’s own tryst. 


71 


IV 
THE DIFFERENT ROAD 


“They went back to their own country by a dsfferent 
road.’—MarttHEew 2: 12. 


EYOND its historic value, I think this story 
B of the Wise Men is a kind of pilgrims’ par- 
able for all men. Read understandingly, al- 
most everything, in outline at least, is packed into 
it. The universe, with its stars and angels and men 
and God, is here focussed toa point. There is noise 
and noiselessness; there is energy and restraint; 
there is the unchanging East and the ever-changing 
West—everything, I say, is here. Do you like cre- 
ative calm? Stand here for the nonce, and feel the 
true meaning of tranquillity. Do you like the pulse 
of power? Put forth your mental fingers, and 
touch its very throb. Do you like calmness and 
energy harmoniously wedded? Stand by for a mo- 
ment, please, and listen to this ungrinding change 
of gear from low things to high. Behold this new 
wedding in the heart’s new Cana of Galilee! 
Sometimes I watch my gulls on Lake Michigan in 
stormless, placid days. Then are they as quiet and 
playful as the waves that make love to the shore. 
And I like my gulls in this mood; for they remind 
me of great white roses peacefully raining their 
petals upon quiet waters. But I like my gulls, also, 
when the storm-king comes with invisible strides 
72 


THE DIFFERENT ROAD 73 


across the troubled deep. Then do my graceful 
white birds forsake the lake below and tumble 
wingedly about in the lake above. Drunk with the 
wine of spilling rains, of screaming winds, of dizzy 
heights and depths, they are mad with joy. And 
yet, through it all, my gulls seem to blend and 
unify the quietude of the unruffled lake with the 
majesty of the roaring storm. Consequently, there 
comes a sense of poise and power beautifully fo- 
cussed. Something like this, I think, awaits us as 
we set our mental and spiritual feet in the differ- 
ent road traversed by Melchior, Caspar, and Bal- 
thazar. 


I 


Centuries before Emerson exhorted us to hitch 
our wagon to a star, men were actually doing it in 
a somewhat remote corner of the planet. What an 
arresting sentence St. Matthew has left us! Tell- 
ing of the return of the Magi, he says, “They went 
back to their own country by a different road.” 
“They”—that is the subject of this challenging sen- 
tence. And who are “they? Wise men, of course, 
sages who “saw the star.” They are star-track 
minds; they hitch their wagon to a star, climb in, 
and the star pulls both them and the wagon. Urged 
by a kind of spiritual gravitation, they keep their 
feet in the dust while their souls move forward, 
pulled by a star. So the different road, does it not, 
suggests souls with an ideal? 

Here, then, is one of our abiding human neces- 
sities: The wisdom that closes with ideals big 
enough for the big business of life. We lack spir- 


74 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


itual height because we do not stretch ourselves up 
toward the heavens of the ideal. As we know, no 
man undertakes to run a business without genuine 
business relations. His key-word is capital—which 
means, besides property values, good-will, integrity, 
diligence, determination to put something useful in- 
to the markets of life. Indeed, when we consider 
the network of which modern industrial concerns 
are wrought, we are amazed at its intricacy. And 
yet, what is the most proficient business man with- 
out a spiritual roof? Just a business man, and 
nothing more—a human cog in the mechanism of 
being when it is his privilege to establish personal 
contact with the Love and Power and Wisdom that 
moves the stars even while it transfigures souls. 

There are many blooms upon the Tree of Life, 
but this transfiguring power produces the fairest 
bloom of all. In a poem entitled, Conspiracy, the 
author sings how two lovers met and were con- 
quered by Love. First, it was the stars that did it 
—the stars, the wind, and the sea that rode behind 
in wildness and whiteness and freedom. Next, it 
was the wind that did it—the wind, the sea, and the 
stars that burned their flame into souls. ‘Then, 
third, it was the sea that did it—the sea, the stars, 
and the wind “that blew in gales of high romance.” 
But, finally : 

“It was the three that did it— 
Conspirators, dream-shod, 
They made of me a worshiper, 
They made of you a god!” 


“Oh,” but you protest, “that is only romance, and 
has no place in religion!’ Ah, I see! And seeing, 


THE DIFFERENT ROAD 75 


I wonder if such an attitude is not largely respon- 
sible for much of the dust, dullness, and doddering 
to which certain expositions of Christianity are un- 
worthily related? Here is a question I want an- 
swered—and I want the answer to be quick and 
deep and divine: Why does anybody love? Why, 
in the long roll of the ages, has anybody ever loved 
anywhere and at any time? That is the question, 
and here, also, is the answer: “We love, because 
He first loved us.” "Talk about romance! Here is 
New Testament romance that gets in behind stars 
and winds and seas and souls and whispers to every 
understanding heart, ““You love because the Eter- 
nal Lover is Love and is everlastingly loving His 
creation and creatures out of the depths up to the 
heights from which He continuously comes down to 
move the whole up to Himself.” 

It is the living Christ Who helps us to realize 
somewhat, even here and now, the creative power 
pulsing through the Christian ideal. Perhaps we 
are a bit shy of the word! Yet, thrust as we are 
into the muck and mire of materialism, we have no 
right to be afraid of this term. Speaking for phi- 
losophy, Thomas Hill Green says: “It will be un- 
derstood by an ideal object is meant an object pres- 
ent in idea but not yet given in reality.” We must 
not quarrel with philosophy while it speaks its own 
tongue; let us, rather, retain our philosophy even 
while we experience something better—I mean the 
life, the light, the love of God in Christ Jesus our 
Lord. He is the center toward which all Platonic 
and Kantian roads lead. But He is more than that; 
He is the Divine Breath which, like the morning, 


76 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


breathes a sweet Annunciation after the night-rain. 
And that, for garden and hill and meadow, spells 
vitality and greenness; which, when lifted into the 
realm of human values, brings assurance and pas- 
sion of the Reality playing into the human heart 
out of the Heart of the Infinite. 

This, then, is one of the big meanings of the 
different road: It guides star-led souls into the light 
of sovereign ideals. Translated into everyday 
speech, our ideal is just the name and number of the 
street whereon we inwardly live. “As a man think- 
eth in his heart, so is he.” The last one of us can 
afford to let the universe go by, until we honestly 
learn where we are living on the invisible and un- 
marked street of our mind, heart, strength, and will. 
For nothing greatly practical can come out of us 
until this has been done. Do you remember the old 
mortar-mixer on one of the English cathedrals? At 
the dinner hour, instead of companying with his 
fellow-workmen, he sat close by the office, looking 
at a colored sketch on one of the walls. Rebuked 
by his comrades for his lack of comradeship during 
the noon recess, the old man said: “No, my friends, 
you are mistaken about that. That’s not the reason 
I’ve got for sitting here day after day. As you all 
know, I’m only an old mortar-mixer on this job; 
but it helps me to mix my mortar better when I see 
what a beautiful building I’m working on.” 

Now, each of us is working on a building. We 
use our brains and hands and feet in the task, yet it 
is “a house not made with hands;” it is the house 
made by our thoughts, our aims, our ideals. I am 
sure we shall mix a better quality of spiritual mor- 


THE DIFFERENT ROAD 77 


tar if we pause, daily, to see what a mysteriously 
enchanting building we are working on. God said 
to Moses: ‘See that thou make them after their 
pattern, which hath been showed thee in the 
mount.” 

And are not hours of prayer and meditation the 
times when we ascend our own invisible mount and 
behold the Divine Pattern of character in Christ? 
Therefore, we must guard these times most dili- 
gently. Many, no doubt, will accuse us of fellow- 
less isolation and lack of interest in things practical. 
But never mind the accusation! ‘There is a thing 
greater than the spirit of the age,” said a seer, “‘and 
that is the spirit of the ages.” Men must be bap- 
tized into the spirit of the ages—that is, the Holy 
Spirit revealed and sent by the Lord Christ—before 
they can properly do the work of the age, before 
they can gain any worthy conception of the nobility 
and grandeur of the building they are working on 
in the midst of the years. And this, one may re- 
affirm with strenuous insistence, is creatively prac- 
tical work. Is it not at this very point that we need 
a new and sensible understanding of the words 
realism and idealism? “A thing utterly baffling to 
me,” said that rare soul, Gene Stratton Porter— 
whose untimely death was one more of thousands 
reminding us of our death-dealing era of wheels 
within wheels—“is why a life history of the sins 
and shortcomings of a man constitute a book of 
realism, and the life history of a just and incorrupt- 
ible man should constitute a book of idealism. Is 
not a moral man as real as an immoral one?” 

Once we have asked the question, how utterly 


78 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


silly the gutter-snipe philosophy appears! John 
Galsworthy says of Joseph Conrad that he “had an 
almost ferocious enjoyment of the absurd.” And 
is not a large section of the crazy-mindedness of to- 
day ferociously devoted to the enjoyment of its own 
absurdity? We see it in fiction. Hugo, Thackeray, 
and Dickens—ah, me, they lack style. We see it in 
art. Angelo, Raphael, and Rembrandt—poor souls, 
they are not cubists. We see it in poetry. Long- 
fellow, Browning, and Tennyson—were they not 
ultra-Victorian? I do not belong to those who 
think that all romance has been exhausted, that all 
beauty has been painted, that all poetry has been 
written. Nevertheless, I challenge large sections of 
our twentieth century story-tellers, painters, and 
poets to bring forth works that will cause the next 
generation to seriously consider either their names 
or their works. 

And if this should be actually so, the explanation 
will not be due entirely to craftsmanship; the para- 
mount reason will be: Cleverness dedicated to prov- 
ing that art for art’s sake is all there is, while 
morality—not the medieval type nor the mid-Vic- 
torian—but just plain, decent, unwithering moral- 
ity is not really essential in the warp and woof of 
life. And is there not something deadly and dead- 
ening in this spirit? Coarse womanhood as well as 
immoral manhood, cannot be held guiltless in large 
sections of our society that walks with its body 
and soul unbuttoned and is, tragically enough, un- 
ashamed. Sacrificing its sense of modesty, it has 
lost the power to blush! ‘“‘Why don’t you treat us 
with respect?’ a woman asked a man, who rebels 


THE DIFFERENT ROAD 79 


at the feminine brazenness that crosses his own 
threshold. “Because,” he replied, “you women act 
too much like indecent men to deserve the respect 
of decent ones.” A hard saying, indeed; but has 
not immorality the hardness of death itself within 
its own godless heart? No age ever yet got by with 
it without summoning the undertaker to direct its 
unhallowed corpse to the graveyard. For, as the 
wise man said, there is a greater thing than the 
spirit of the age, and that is the spirit of the ages. 
Moreover, history shows that the Spirit of the Ages 
has an uncanny method of rising up at the most un- 
expected moment and declaring: 


“When thou hearest the fool rejoicing, and he saith, 
‘It is over and past, 
And the wrong was better than right, and hate turns 
into love at the last, 
And we strove for nothing at all, and the gods are 
fallen asleep ; 
For so good is the world agrowing that the evil good 
shall reap’— 
Then loosen the sword in thy scabbard and settle the 
helm, on thine head, 
For men betrayed are mighty, and great are the 
wrongfully dead.” 


One twilight a friend of mine went into his office. 
He thought nobody was in the room, but the woman 
who told me the story happened to be there. A 
short time before, he had sent a picture to his office 
to be hung on the walls. Entering the office, he 
walked straight up to the picture, which had not 
been properly hung. Having eyes, seemingly, on 
the tips of his fingers as well as in the front of his 


80 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


head, he began hanging the picture as it should be, 
saying loud enough to be heard by the one who told 
me the story: “Lord, Thou knowest that I hate a 
bad job.” 

Does not this spell the difference between a muck- 
heap mind and a star-led soul? We have to hate 
something terribly before we can love the supreme 
enthusiastically. Suppose, then, we learn to harbor 
a fresh new hate for those bad jobs named lies in 
word or deed; for the petty parochialism which 
would pack the universe into our national and indi- 
vidual back-yards; for the iron-footed hurry that 
tramples the flowers of gentleness and courtesy into 
the unfertile dust of aimless mental and moral vag- 
abondage. Up in the Northwest I undertook to tell 
some people of the things I got, along with the pur- 
chase of a bit of property on the South Side of 
Chicago. Besides the building and the lot, I said 
that my Swedish neighbor threw in a bundle of 
values the income tax man can never send me a bill 
for. For example—the sky, the wind, the lake, the 
park; human things, too—faithful fathers, devoted 
mothers, happy children, good neighbors, lovers and 
sweethearts; Divine realities, also, faith, hope, and 
love—in a word, God over all and through all and 
in all. A friend up there in Duluth—a good min- 
ister of Jesus Christ—has since sent me a poem with 
the legend, “Read it and pass it on.” So I am 
obeying the injunction: 

“Just out on the rim of the city, 
As the records and files relate, 


I have title and sole possession 
To a princely and vast estate. 


THE DIFFERENT ROAD 81 


It is only one-half of an acre, 
As it’s marked and arranged in the plat; 
But my ownership awes and inspires me, 
For it runs a bit deeper than that. 


It goes from the tree roots downward 
Half as far as the world is through, 

And up from the rustling branches 
Past the clouds to the heavenly blue. 


And well pleased with my great dominion, 
I gaze through the night sky afar, 

And lo! at the end of the trillionth mile 
I find that I own a star!” 


II 


The different road suggests souls with self-ad- 
apting genius. “They went back to their own coun- 
try by a different road.” Now, life is full of differ- 
ent roads; indeed, the different road is one of the 
Divine methods of educating us. Therefore, suc- 
cessful soul-travel is largely determined by our seli- 
adjusting capacity. 

Consider this truth with reference to one’s call- 
ing. Not every man easily finds his sphere. Some- 
times a long, steep path, zig-zagging in and out, up 
and down, has to be trodden before our feet fit into 
the right road. Think of Steinmetz, almost failing 
to get past our immigration authorities. There he 
stands knocking—knocking—a physically mal- 
formed man, well-nigh friendless, a stranger at the 
gates of the New World. Grant that a certain 
unity of genius rules such a spirit anywhere and 
under all circumstances, but do not ignore, in the 


interest of facts, the confusing roads of chance and 
6 


82 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


opposition, all converging about the house of life 
occupied by this outcast German Socialist. Sick, 
unable to speak our language, did he not stand by 
the side of the most unpromising road? And yet, 
in that hour something mightier than the chaos of 
mere circumstance began to stir within the lonely 
German’s disordered world. It was nothing less 
than his own ability to adjust himself to the high- 
way of destiny that mysteriously beckoned. He 
seems to be saying, all through those fateful years: 
“Yes, the roads are many; the roads are confusing 
—they wind everywhither. But there is something 
greater in life than roads, easy or difficult; it is the 
stern stuff that fits itself to environment and com- 
mands environment to help unfold a masterful 
genius in the realm of electricity.”’ 

The same law operates in all high friendship. 
How many different roads of acquaintance have 
lured and lured when, somehow, one golden road of 
friendship suddenly stopped at our door! Quite 
bewildered by the richness of it all, we ask, in our 
luminous hours: ‘‘How did such holy good for- 
tune come to me?” It must have been in some such 
hour that Joseph Parker was asked: “Tell me, how 
did the Lord ever call Judas in the first place?” 
The great preacher answered: “I have a harder 
problem than that; I have been wondering how the 
Lord ever called me.” 

But the road of friendship, human and Divine, 
is not strewn with primroses. “The tragedy of life,” 
said an old mother, “is not age or poverty or pain. 
It is man’s failure to his friends. Twenty years of 
happy association, twenty years of trust and work 


THE DIFFERENT ROAD 83 


and play together are swallowed up in five minutes 
of bitterness. If friendship cannot endure five 
minutes of heat, of impulsive words after twenty 
years of trial, friendship is a pretense. That is the 
tragedy of life.” So, when the road of misunder- 
standing, of slander, of baseless inference, of seem- 
ing or real neglect, comes running by, what is it 
but a high challenge to my faith in God and man to 
say: “This road is wrong; it is essentially crooked, 
however straight it may appear; I will not allow 
my feet to walk init. There is a great road, a for- 
giving road, a cleansing road—yea, the Christly 
road! By the grace of God, I will set my feet in 
that, and save myself, my friend, and our friend- 
ship.” 

Whoever acts thus, makes contribution of the 
first order, I hold, to the universe itself. It is not 
given to man to create an atom of matter; all he 
can do, at most—which is very wonderful—is to 
change the form of matter. But in the realm of 
heart, mind, and will, man is a creator second only 
to God Himself. When the Good Will that dwelt 
in the bush is enshrined in a human soul, the final 
fashion and meaning of the universe has found ex- 
pression. And just because this work is at once so 
holy, grand, and arduous, we must put into it more 
patience, more sacrifice, more intelligence, more 
longsuffering. Not otherwise does the Christian 
road differ from one of many. “What do ye more 
than others?” is the eternal challenge of the Eternal 
Christ to eternally aspiring souls. Why, when 
everything else has failed, lo! we are at the begin- 
ning of victory! 


84 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


Failing to adjust themselves to this higher way, 
nations inevitably plunge into the abyss. Then do 
the Four Horsemen break loose upon the world. 
Until we learn to put as much enthusiasm and com- 
mon sense into the ways of international comity and 
friendship as we put into the preparation for and 
waging of war, we not only have no right to be 
called Christians, we have no right to be called 
morally intelligent. For thousands of years men 
held that the earth is the center of the solar system. 
Now, however, nobody but a mental illiterate holds 
that view. For thousands of years, also, men have 
held that the only way to settle disputes is by fight- 
ing. But just here the comparison between the 
mental illiterate and the morally illiterate militarist 
ends. For all practical purposes, it makes little dif- 
ference that the ignoramus maintains that the sun 
revolves around the earth. The sun keeps its plane- 
tary children revolving about it, no matter what 
men may say. But in the matter of settling dis- 
putes by war, a new situation has made such a phi- 
losophy horrible to contemplate. For the first time 
in history Man is capable of bringing about his own 
self-destruction. “Is it true that practically the en- 
tire population of London could be killed by gas 
within twelve hours?’ Edison was asked. “It is 
not true,’ he answered. The thing could be done 
within three hours.” 

So the problem before mankind today is this: 
Shall we continue to practice the worst philosophy 
imaginable, or shall we try out on an international 
scale, the best untried philosophy we know? Sup- 
pose, therefore, we change a single word of the 


THE DIFFERENT ROAD 85 


Golden Rule and make it read: ‘Therefore all 
things whatsoever ye would that nations should 
do to you, do ye even so to them.” The instant re- 
ply of the Iron Rule is: “But the application of 
this law is not within the keeping of a single or 
even many nations.” Well, then, inasmuch as no 
first-class power has ever tried the Golden Rule out, 
some of us are eager to see such an experiment 
made. With all the problems involved, moral and 
otherwise—heart-rending and soul-excruciating as 
they are—would it not be worth while for one na- 
tion to invoke vicarious sacrifice than for all na- 
tions to invite world-wide disaster? “But what 
practical good could possibly come out of a nation’s 
self-effacement?” is asked. Is lofty moral example 
a practical force or not? Is self-sacrifice for a 
great end practical or not? Is the unarmed right 
worth dying for or not? These are questions that 
go straight to the soul of the deepest, most sacred 
things in the history of nations and individuals. At 
any rate, as this crimson road of war comes past the 
heart of humanity, Man must somehow learn to say: 
“My feet shall no longer take the road made of 
skulls and drenched with blood. They that take the 
sword shall perish by the sword. I am resolved to 
adapt my goings up into the high mountains of 
God, where men shall not destroy or learn war any 
more.” ‘The road is rugged and steep, inlaid with 
thorns and suffering, but it leads to the higher hero- 
ism which can withstand weapons of flesh through 
the war of the spirit. And there are those—a larger 
number in the world today than ever before—who 
yearn to see this super-statesman-like method put to 


86 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


the test. Perchance God would thereby work out a 
new thing in the earth! Once, when Thoreau was 
addressing a crowd, he said: “A good time is com- 
ing.” A heckler shouted: “Tell us when?” Thor- 
eau’s answer was: “Will you help?” 

Yet, as I have assumed all along, the different 
road brings up, supremely, in the Country of Re- 
ligion. And religion, for us, is not just a generic 
term; it is something specific, unique, even the 
Absolute focused in Christ, functioning through 
Christ. One of the subtlest ways of short-circuit- 
ing the currents of God in Christ is to put them 
upon a competitive basis with other interests or re- 
ligions. “What do ye more than others ?’’—that is 
not only our Lord’s challenge to His disciples; it is 
His undying challenge to Himself. If He was not 
in Himself what no other was or could be; if He 
did not do and teach what no other could do and 
teach; if He is not now alive and at work within 
the world and the universe—we Christians are not 
only of all men most miserable, but we are also in- 
excusably foolish and have no right to idolatrously 
follow a megalomaniac. But because we know that 
God in Christ is leading humanity by a different 
road, here is strategic opportunity for our self-ad- 
apting powers to come into full play. “If any man 
would come after Me, let him take up his cross, 
daily, and follow Me.” In fine, the human will is 
the hinge on which turns the door that opens wide 
for the entrance of God; and whatever other doors 
may be swinging to and fro within the worlds, this 
Door is different—so different that only One would 
dare to say: “I am the door; by Me if any man 


THE DIFFERENT ROAD 87 


enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, 
and shall find pasture.” What a wondrous Door! 
“T am the door’’—unique personality is there. “If 
any man enter in’—universal humanity is there. 
“He shall be saved’’—complete salvation is there. 
“And shall go in and out’—illimitable and life- 
giving freedom is there. “And shall find pasture” 
—nourishment, green, ageless, satisfying, is there. 
I repeat: What a Door—what a wondrous, golden 
door for all the strayed, torn human sheep of God 
to pass through into the Sheepfold of Heaven! 

So, after all, it is this different road in religion 
that matters most. Countless other roads come 
twisting by, but they all stop short of the goal. 
They are good roads, useful roads, beautiful roads; 
we will love them all and use them all, if we are 
vitally Christed through and through. One road is 
named Science; another Philosophy; another Edu- 
cation; another Industry; another Art; another 
Poetry; another Nationality; another Philan- 
thropy. Many and necessary and interesting are 
the other roads. Yet, I insist, it is only as the other 
roads converge at last in the Christly road, that they 
get any true meaning as to where they are going 
and what they are going for. “Seek ye first the 
Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all 
these things shall be added unto you.” Now, we 
moderns are very smart; let us frankly admit it, 
with our characteristic and unblushing audacity. 
Yet I have the feeling that our chameleon-like 
smartness shall be transformed into heavenly states- 
manship when we grow wise enough to set the 
Kingdom of God first—first in industry, first in 


88 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


politics, first in education, first in internationalism. 
Then, indeed, we shall have learned the secret of 
spiritualizing our material possessions, so that all 
these things—food and drink and raiment, the very 
things against which the modern world has cracked 
its brilliant brain and hurt its restless soul—shall be 
added unto us, which is vastly different from allow- 
ing ourselves to be added unto mere things. 

Years ago a boy was in the graduating class of 
Denison University at Granville, Ohio. This youth 
was commissioned to engage a band to play at the 
commencement exercises. First he tried Columbus 
and then Cincinnati, but was unable to find musi- 
cians willing to come for what the graduating class 
could pay. At last he heard of a good band at New 
Concord in Muskingum county. He wrote to the 
leader, who was also a young man. The band went 
to the Denison commencement and played to the 
satisfaction of all. Many years afterward, these 
two young men met—the one a Minneapolis lawyer, 
the other a Chicago educator. “I hear it said, Dr. 
Harper,” began the lawyer, “that you used to play 
in a band at New Concord, Ohio. Were you a 
member of that band that went up from there once 
to play at commencement at Granville?’ President 
William R. Harper—for it was he—looked sharply 
at the lawyer and asked: “What do you know 
about that New Concord Band?” ‘Well,’ an- 
swered the lawyer, “I was the fellow who wrote 
over to New Concord and engaged that band to 
come.” “You were, were you? Did the band please 
you? Did it play well?” The educator still looked 
at the lawyer as if he had him on cross-examina- 


THE DIFFERENT ROAD 89 


tion. “Indeed it did play well,’ said the lawyer. 
“Tl always remember what good music it fur- 
nished us.”’ 

Harper’s manner changed in an instant. Jump- 
ing at the lawyer, he almost wrung his hand off as 
he shouted: ‘“You’re the man who’s responsible for 
me. That was my band, and I’m proud to hear you 
say it furnished good music. And if you’re the 
man who wrote that invitation, you’re responsible 
for everything I’ve done since then.” Then Harper 
told the lawyer how, after graduating from Mus- 
kingum College in New Concord, he didn’t have an 
ambition on earth; how he loved to play the cornet 
and organized that band; how the letter came from 
Granville and he accepted the invitation to play at 
commencement; how, after the exercises were over 
and the other boys had gone home, young Harper 
lingered in Granville, talked with some of the pro- 
fessors, and decided to take up some special studies, 
paying his way through tutoring. “Well,” said 
William Rainey Harper, ‘“‘something began to stir 
in me of a desire to make something more out of 
myself, and I said I would do it. So I went back 
to Granville that fall and began both teaching and 
studying there in the college. I got thoroughly 
wrapped up in the college life. Then along in mid- 
winter, there came a great revival of religion in the 
college. I was converted that winter, and I made 
up my mind I would be a minister. So my friends 
there arranged for me to go to Yale. Everything 
that has come to me since grew out of that.’’ Look 
at the factors in this great man’s life. What are 
they? First, there was a great revival of religion; 


90 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


second, he was converted; third, he made up his 
mind to be a minister. “Everything that has come 
to me since grew out of that.” Verily, all roads at 
last meet in the different road, even the spiritual 
highway cast up by the Lord of the Soul. 


Ill 


The different road, moreover, may impart to pil- 
grims a new insight into the meaning of country. 
“They went back to their own country by a differ- 
ent road.’”’ For my own part, I heartily love this 
word “country.” It signifies, literally, “that which 
is over against or before one.” But I love it, also, 
for what more than sheer literalness implies. 

I love it first because, in the nature of things, it 
contains something intensely individual, ineradi- 
cably personal. I wonder if these wise men, after 
they returned home, may not have said something 
like this: “Well, we followed the star; it brought 
us to the cradle; we made our gifts; we saw Judea 
and many different kinds of people and modes of 
life. Still, it is good to be back home again. Here 
in our own country the stars seem to shine brighter; 
the birds seem to sing sweeter; the winds seem to 
blow kindlier; the flowers seem to bloom lovelier.”’ 
Mind you, I am not saying that these men said such 
things at all; I am simply suggesting that they 
might have said them and felt the sincerity of their 
words. The fact is, true love of country is so in- 
dividual and fine a matter that only superficial peo- 
ple disregard it. 

Moreover, is it not impossible for men to wholly 


THE DIFFERENT ROAD 91 


ignore their national strain? For Pharaoh to say, 
“TI will have none of the Egyptian in my blood,” is 
not sufficient cause for the Egyptian to move out; 
Egypt would still manage to camp in a few of Phar- 
aoh’s corpuscles. Socrates could never get over the 
fact that he was a Greek; and did not the Eternal 
Mind haunt the philosopher through Greek molds? 
And Michel de Montaigne, wakened from child- 
hood’s slumber by strains of music, astounding the 
college at Bordeaux by his Latinity at the age of 
six, climbing many hills of knowledge as a man, 
feeder of Shakespeare and inspirer of Emerson— 
did not Montaigne have so much of the French 
genius veined into his make-up, that he was never 
- quite able to break loose from it, nor had he any 
desire to do so? And that English Cromwell—he 
of the Ironsides and the Psalms and other things! 
—is there not something so definitely English about 
him as to make us apply the words of young Rupert 
Brooke to the two of them: 


“Tf I should die, think only this of me: 

That there’s some corner of a foreign field 

That is forever England. There shall be 
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed ; 

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, 
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, 

A body of England’s, breathing English air, 
Washed by the rivers, blessed by the suns of home. 


And think, this heart, all evil shed away, 
A pulse in the Eternal Mind, no less 
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England 
given; 


92 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; 
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness; 
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.” 


As for our own Lincoln, surround him with kings 
or angels, I think something of the cabin and the 
prairie would continue to wind through his goodly 
talk—yea, too, the American cabin, the American 
prairie! Thus, I like this word “country” because 
it has been dipped in both the vats of nationalism 
and individualism and its colorful stains will not 
come out. 

But I like the word for a second reason: It con- 
tains something necessarily world-wide and inter- 
national. Since “the far away and long ago”—the 
time of the family, the clan, the tribe—there has 
not been, in reality, any such thing as only “me and 
my own country.” Things have been so jammed 
together in late years that we are liable to overlook 
the fact that countries have always had to depend 
upon each other. This is just the indisputable 
premise of what we call civilization. My own coun- 
try is because all countries are. The modern man, 
no matter what his own country, has to confess: 
“The Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Carthaginian, the 
Greek, the Roman, the Anglo Saxon—all have un- 
mistakably gone into the making of my country. 
In spite of time and distance and change and mis- 
understanding and hate and war, all the countries 
of mankind have silently and surely contributed to 
my own. Loving my own country as no other, in- 
telligence, duty, and privilege compel me to acknowl- 
edge the indebtedness of my country to all peoples 
and all ages.”’ 


THE DIFFERENT ROAD 93 


“But,” exclaims the cynic, “this is rather trite, 
vague, and non-Nordic!” Very well! Let us have 
both triteness and vagueness rather than the rabid 
nationalism which seems to think that devotion to 
one’s own country carries with it corresponding 
hatred and distrust of all countries. Moreover, 
however real the cause of hatred and distrust may 
be, it certainly cannot be removed by more hatred 
and distrust. Do we try to cure disease by adding 
more disease? Well, the only way to cure national 
and political disease is to inject the germs of nat- 
ional and political health. As almost every con- 
ceivable formula has been tried without permanent 
success, is it not high time for men to become wise 
enough to test the Way that leads to the unfolding 
of national genius, and at the same time helps all 
nations toward the self-realization which merges 
into the Kingdom of God? 

I like the word country, thirdly, because it con- 
tains something absolutely spiritual. “Now this 
Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to 
the Jerusalem that now is: for she is in bondage 
with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above 
is free, which is our mother.” As certain geologi- 
cal strata run under all oceans, so the spiritual herit- 
age of mankind runs above all nations and reaches 
unto the City of God. “For they that say such 
things make it manifest that they are seeking after 
a country of their own. And if indeed they had 
been mindful of that country from which they went 
out, they would have had opportunity to return. 
But now they desire a better country, that is, a 
heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed of them 


94 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


to be called their God; for He hath prepared for 
them a city.” 

Here, then, is the heavenly secret of the new in- 
sight into my own and other countries. It is rooted 
in the spiritual, which is the eternal. And upon 
this, the sixty-eighth anniversary of his birth, I 
think the emphasis he placed upon this truth is one 
of the outstanding contributions of the Great War 
President. ‘It is my deliberate belief,” says Elihu 
Root, ‘that the greatest contributions to the his- 
tory of world peace are the negotiations and ex- 
changes that have failed in their immediate object. 
The man who has spent himself in the march or in 
the charge before he reached the breastworks is a 
greater benefactor to the world than the man who 
sets the flag.” Now, in one of the four or five biog- 
raphies which have been published within a year of 
his death, an announcement reads: “It is high time 
for a thorough, frank, and impartial appraisal of 
Woodrow Wilson as man and President.” Hardly! 
That sentence was written by the “ad. man,” not 
by the historian. We are reminded of the Great 
War Library presented by Mr. Herbert Hoover to 
Leland Stanford University; it is sealed, and will 
not be opened for twenty-five years. We are re- 
minded, also, of the judgment of Doctor Charles 
W. Eliot, that in about fifty years historians will be 
able to take the historic proportions of the world’s 
first international statesman. ‘‘Woodrow Wilson,” 
says William Allen White in his volume, ‘‘the ad- 
ministrator, the head of the Army and Navy, put 
into battle millions of men, and treasure beyond the 
dream of avarice. During the nineteen months of 


THE DIFFERENT ROAD 95 


the War, those men and that treasure, hurtling out 
of the catapult of our physical fortress, crashed into 
the German forces terrifically. Probably no con- 
queror in the world, not Philip of Macedon, not 
Cesar, not Genghis Khan, not Napoleon, ever in so 
short a time assembled so much death-dealing force 
against an enemy. Wilson, meeting force with 
force, was an Ajax hurling thunderbolts. And yet, 
what he did with force will crumble. If only force 
had conquered the Kaiser, he and his kind could 
return again. But the conflict in the upper zone, the 
weapons of the spirit, the thunderbolts of reason, 
the shafts of resistless logic, Wilson’s will for a 
more abundant life on this planet, his vision of a 
new order, his call to a nobler civilization, the 
Olympian debate which he began April 2, 1927, and 
continued for three years until he was stricken— 
that is a part of the conquest of this War which 
leaves him a world conqueror, the only one whose 
fortifications will not turn to dust.” 


In other words, Woodrow Wilson’s insight into 
his own country and all other countries roots itself, 
finally, in the soil of the Better Country, that is, a 
Heavenly. Walking along the seashore with a 
friend, years before he was President, he remarked 
that if he ever attained to that great office, it would 
mean for him the supreme sacrifice. Looking out 
into the mysterious deep, he quoted aloud his own 
elegy—the last poem in The Oxford Book of Eng- 
lish Verse: 


“In the hour of death, after this life’s whim, 
When the heart beats low and the eyes grow dim, 


96 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


And pain has exhausted every limb— 
The lover of the Lord shall trust in Him. 


When the will has forgotten the lifelong aim, 

And the mind can only disgrace its fame, 

And a man is uncertain of his own name— 
The power of the Lord shall fill this frame. 


When the last sigh is heaved, and the last tear is shed, 
And the coffin is waiting beside the bed, 
And the widow and child forsake the dead— 

The angel of the Lord shall lift this head. 


For even the purest delight may pall, 

And power must fail and pride must fall, 

And the love of the dearest friends grow small— 
But the glory of the Lord is all in all.” 


Like the wise men, all human beings may be led 
by the Undying Star of God. Coming out of the 
mystic deeps, our feet may be lured by many roads; 
but, following the Star, we shall find with joy un- 
speakable the different road. It will lead us back 
to our own Country, whose capital is the City of 
God, whose citizens are the redeemed out of all na- 
tions, whose Saviour is the Lamb of God that taketh 
away the sin of the universe. 


V 


DHESAPE DAD ION DHt CHRISTIAN 
MINISTRY * 


“Take heed to the ministry which thou hast received 
in the Lord,’—Cor. 4:17. 


IKE, my predecessors in this lectureship, I find 
ip my subject already stated: “The Appeal of 
the Christian Ministry.” Thus, the state- 
ment of theme does not vary from year to year; 
the variousness will consist in the approaches and 
expositions of the various lecturers. While I did 
not choose the subject, let me add that I like it im- 
mensely. It is big and vital, entirely worthy of the 
best that our most competent Christian thinkers can 
bring to its elucidation and development. 


I 


The first note in the appeal of the Christian min- 
istry relates to Manhood. The minister must be 
something; this is in the category of first things 
that must come first. The Christian minister is 
compounded of the elements of. Christlikeness. 
There is about him a tang and tone that distin- 
guishes him from other men; and this, too, without 
implying that there is not a genuine Christlikeness 
in other men. Yet this distinction, it cannot be said 
too emphatically, is not in his dress nor his walk 


*The Mills Lecture, Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Ind., March 
12, 1924, 
97 


"f 


98 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


nor his talk, primarily. These may all be more or 
less modified and influenced by the subtle airs blow- 
ing through any profession whatsoever. Each 
bears its own external marks. But the distinguish- 
ing and definitive phase of the Christian minister 
is so deep and unustal as to be explained by noth- 
ing less than his own Christianized self. 

Too much emphasis can scarcely be placed upon 
this aspect of our study. Christ within the soul, 
Christ manifesting Himself through the activities 
of the soul—that is the mark of any Christian, of 
course; but for a Christian minister to be wanting 
in this absolute qualification spells a tragedy too 
deep for words or tears. “I know Him Whom I 
have believed’—that is the apostolic and classic 
Christian experience of these twenty centuries. 
Many things the Christian minister may not know; 
but this one thing he must know if he is to perform, 
acceptably to God and man, the duties of his high 
calling. 

I shall not tarry at this juncture to point out what 
one may call the lesser religious conceptions. They 
are ethical, humane, intellectual, shot through with 
the light of morality. At the same time, either com- 
paring or contrasting them with the New Testament 
and historic experience of those believing in the 
God and Father revealed only in Jesus Christ, they 
betray an incompleteness which can be accounted 
for solely by the absence of faith in the personal, 
living, redeeming, reigning Christ. To believe in 
God is one thing, and a very great thing; to be- 
lieve in “the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus 
our Lord,” is a much larger and greater thing. 


THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 99 


This, then, is the first necessity of the Christian 
minister, and, through him, the matchless appeal of 
the Christian ministry: He must be something. 
Upon this particular point Woodrow Wilson has 
spoken words every minister should hide in his 
heart. “When I hear some of the things which 
young men say to me by way of putting the argu- 
ments to themselves for going into the ministry, I 
think that they are talking of another profession,” 
he says. “Their motive is to do something, when 
it should be to be something. You do not have to 
be anything in particular to be a lawyer. I have 
been a lawyer and I know. You do not have to be 
anything in particular, except a kind-hearted man, 
perhaps, to be a physician; you do not have to be 
anything, nor to undergo any strong’ spiritual 
change, in order to be a merchant. The only pro- 
fession which consists in being something is the 
ministry of our Lord and Saviour—and it does not 
consist of anything else. And that conception of 
the minister which rubs all the marks of it off and 
mixes him in the crowd so that you cannot pick him 
out, is a process of eliminating the ministry itself.” 

Now, in being something, the Christian minis- 
ter is the greatest of all beings known to our world. 
He is man marked with the plus mark. A man by 
virtue of race, he is a minister by virtue of grace— 
even the grace of God in Christ. An edition of 
Christian manhood is so rich, so wrought of all at- 
tractive virtues, that I shall attempt to single out 
only one feature at this time; but in this one fea- 
ure lies a very strong appeal to young men deter- 
mined to become strong men in the noblest sense. 


100 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


It is summed up in the word Courage. Significantly 
enough, in both Latin and French the word for 
courage is a blood-relation of the word for heart. 
Get a man’s whole heart and you get the whole man. 
And is not that what the Christian ministry de- 
mands—a whole man? Yet how dare we think of 
a whole man devoid of courage? We simply can- 
not. Therefore, the Christian minister must be 
alive with courage. ‘That means physical courage 
—ready to die, if need be, for his cause. It means 
intellectual courage—bravery to face the tremen- 
dous intellectual problems always contesting his 
progress. It implies, of course, moral courage— 
the rarest of all and the greatest of all. 

Now, has there ever been an era when this full- 
toned courage was more imperative than our own? 
I think not. The times have always been out of 
joint, but never have the times been so jointless on 
a world-scale as today. Humanity is indeed on the 
march, but where is it marching to, and what is the 
ideal that is moving it? These are questions of in- 
finite and contemporary moment. ‘They cannot be 
answered in the old nationalistic strain without re- 
sultant doom and destruction to civilization itself. 
Yet multitudes are sincere in their conviction that 
the nations must continue to war and make war as 
in the past. Egged on by politicians in various 
nations, these very patriots are in danger of be- 
coming super-patriots. We have a few in America. 
Nevertheless, what all men everywhere need to be 
told is: The God of the whole earth has a con- 
tention with the nations of the earth in the matter 
of fostering and conducting war. But the super- 


THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 101 


patriot of any nation is in no mood to listen to 
common sense, much less the spirit of Christianity. 
Consequently, the new crusade has no less a task 
than to change the outlook of the majority of peo- 
ple with reference to the place, value, and meaning 
of their own nation among all nations. As Mr. A. 
Clutton Brock suggests, we must learn to pool our 
national self-esteem, even as we pool our personal 
and family self-esteem. To be everlastingly harp- 
ing about one’s self or family is the height of bad 
manners; so much have we already learned as indi- 
viduals. A similar lesson must be learned by na- 
tions. To be incessantly talking about the superior- 
ity of “my country” is stock-in-trade for the pro- 
fessional politician and militarist; we rather expect 
this of these gentlemen; but intelligent, patriotic 
citizens, willing to both live and die for their coun- 
try if their country is right, knowing that their own 
citizenship is bound up with the welfare of man- 
kind, must insist, as never before, upon the true and 
more Christian viewpoint. 

But to do this—make no mistake!—requires 
courage of the grandest and deepest sort. Person- 
ally, I am not able to accept the philosophy of 
pacifism. In a world such as ours designing men 
may compel even Christians to fight a righteous 
war, though it means a kind of moral crucifixion to 
them. Perhaps it was this feeling that caused 
Franklin to say: “There never was a good war or 
a bad peace.” Yet, bad as all wars are, it is some- 
times necessary to wage them on behalf of the right 
itself—and right, said our World-War President, 
is more precious than peace. But while I am not a 


1022 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


pacifist, I admire many pacifists for this reason: 
They exemplify a high-minded courage. In many 
instances they manifest more physical, mental, and 
moral courage than is required “‘to kiss the lips of 
a blazing cannon.” It is only the yellowest of yel- 
low journals that impute either physical cowardice 
or moral weakness to many of those calling them- 
selves pacifists. In not a few instances the pacifists 
embody 'more manhood, more mentality, more mor- 
ality, and more genuine patriotism than their tra- 
ducers. For example, Bertrand Russell can intel- 
lectually swallow most of the English and American 
penny-a-liners and run no risk whatever of suffer- 
ing an attack of mental indigestion therefrom. 

Well, this is the kind of courage that the Chris- 
tian ministry must have; and having it—illustra- 
ting it by words and deeds—he ranks with those 
who make the Christian ministry offer its irresist- 
able appeal to the true, the brave, and unselfish of 
every generation of youth. 


If 


The second note in the appeal of the Christian 
ministry is Vision. ‘The minister must see some- 
thing. And upon this matter of vision I wonder 
if those familiar words of Ruskin have not a kind 
of finality? He said that the longer he lived the 
more deeply he was convinced that the greatest 
thing a human being ever does is to see something 
and then tell what he sees in a plain way. If not 
final, the words are at least tremendously sugges- 
tive, because they contain two of the most essential 
qualifications of the true minister. 


THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 103 


The first, as already indicated, is vision. Let us 
try to grasp the meaning of Christian vision by at- 
tempting to say what it is not. We may do this 
with the aid of the dictionary—a book in which 
many ministers are altogether too little read. 
Vision, we are told, is the act of seeing external 
objects. Well, Christian vision is not that. Again: 
It is the faculty that perceives the luminosity, color, 
form, and relative size of objects. Christian vision 
is not that. A third definition says vision is ‘‘that 
which is seen; an object of sight; specifically, a 
supernatural or prophetic appearance; something 
seen in a dream, ecstasy, trance, or the like; also, 
an imaginary appearance; an apparition; a phan- 
tom.” ‘This definition brings us to the point, as the 
children say in playtime, where we are, in the game 
of definition, “getting warm.’ And yet, we may 
almost say again, Christian vision is not that. 
However, when we leave the verbal territory gov- 
erned by adjectives and nouns and cross the vital 
frontiers into the land of the verbs, we make a real 
approach to the heart of the idea. For vision, we 
then read, is to “perceive by the eye of the intellect 
or imagination.” 

In this definition we approach the heart of what 
I take to be the Christian concept of vision. For 
to arrive at and within the reality so far as words 
may assist us, I think there is a mysterious blend- 
ing of the intellectual and imaginational, trans- 
figured by the light radiating from the Person of 
the historic and eternal Saviour; in a word, what 
Paul calls “the light of the knowledge of the glory 
of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Wherever this 


104 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


focus occurs in a human soul, that soul is lifted to 
what we may name, for want of a better term, the 
fourth dimension of reality. ‘Metaphysics?’ O 
yes—plenty of “it” or “them” or “both!” Still, we 
must not get frightened at a big word, especially 
when the thought it contains haunts us, finally, in 
every stick or stone by the wayside. Is it not a 
fact that the moment we undertake to ultimately 
explain anything at all we leap into the ocean of 
metaphysics? ‘The science of physics and the phi- 
losophy of metaphysics dwell far apart in our de- 
partmental methods of thinking; and there are ex- 
cellent academic reasons why this should be so. 
Yet, when we dare to venture into the realm of 
causality—that which lies behind and within elec- 
trons, worlds, wills, minds, logic, philosophy, art, 
and science—the Infinite All comes thundering 
down upon our academic houses built of mental 
egg-shells, and the ruins thereof are engulfed in 
a soundless sea of metaphysics! 

However, let us get back to our thought of vision. 
Everybody should have vision, of course; but there 
is one body who must have it or fail; and that body 
is the minister. And now it is time to add what 
the content of his vision must be. As always, the 
Master has left nothing vital to be said upon this 
subject. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’—we have 
heard it a thousand times, but after we have been 
in Heaven a million years, we shall still be wonder- 
ing at its ever-growing meaning!—‘“for they shall 
see God.” Here, then, is the content of our vision. 

“But what does it mean?” you ask. Frankly, I 
don’t know; and again, frankly, if I could tell you 


THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 105 


all that it means, it could not possibly mean all that 
it unquestionably does mean. We know, of course, 
the surface significance—that it means moral and 
spiritual as contrasted with formal or ceremonial 
purity; that it has to do with the eyes in the soul 
rather than with the eyes in the head. This much 
we know. But to see God—what does that mean? 
Again, I can’t tell you. But it must mean more 
than to define God; yea, it means more than to 
experience God. Every soul may experience all of 
God it is capable of experiencing, and there are 
still inexhaustible, unfathomable depths of God- 
hood which remain unexperienced. “But now,’ 
you exclaim, “to metaphysics you have added mys- 
ticism!”’ Yes, mysticism also contains a part of our 
vision of God. The mystics, the poets, and the 
prophets usually have a more inspiring conception 
of God than the scientists, the logicians, and the 
philosophers. It ought not to be so, but it is; and 
due, perhaps, to a reason somewhat akin to that 
given by a scholar in criticism of the evil ways into 
which a certain university had fallen. This institu- 
tion, it seems, was making more of social prestige 
and financial pull than of scholarship and character. 
“The sideshow,” laconically remarked the reform- 
president, ‘‘has swallowed the circus.” That is what 
often happens with thinkers in their attitude towards 
God. They become so engrossed in forces and laws 
and secondary matters that they lose sight of the 
Great Original; their mental sideshows simply swal- 
low, for them, the Eternal Performer. And then, 
unfortunately, they forthwith conclude that God is 
not, or that He is just a chimera to everybody else 


106 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


in the world. Happily, the saints, the mystics, the 
prophets, the poets, the child-hearted, and the pure- 
hearted, out of every age and people, correct the 
aberrations of those who have allowed “the side- 
show to swallow the circus.” 

Now, for the minister to be hesitant or uncertain 
about his vision of God in Christ, is fatal to his 
supreme usefulness. As I have already said, there 
are many things he cannot know, may never know. 
But one thing he may know and must know: that, 
whereas he was spiritually blind, he now sees; he 
sees God, he sees the universe, he sees souls in the 
light of his subliming vision of God and is authentic 
with a glowing energy to help them up the high 
hills whereon they, too, may have their own vision 
of that Fatherhood out of Whom all fatherhoods 
and motherhoods are a processional of unaging 
reality. 

Ruskin’s words imply vision not only, but ex- 
pression also. Among the great acts of the soul, 
he says, is to see and tell in a plain way. Here, 
then, is one of the undying appeals of the Christian 
ministry; its votary must tell, must utter, its vision 
of God. We come, therefore, upon one of the 
sublimest and simplest facts in the history of the 
world. For, at bottom, all the great moods and 
movements of mankind lie in the efforts of men to 
publish their vision of God. All great music, art, 
eloquence, prophecy, literature, freedom, govern- 
ment, statesmanship—all are based, finally, upon 
man’s growing vision of God and his high resolve 
to tell that vision in terms of a better civilization. 
For there are those who believe that civilization it- 


THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 107 


self can be Christianized. Confessing that the 
process is only in its birth-throes, yet is not birth a 
necessary stage of life? Never before have birth- 
pangs smitten the planet upon such a scale. ‘“‘We 
are living,’ says a thinker, “in one of the immense 
upheavals of the world. There has been no change 
comparable to it among the States of Europe since 
the downfall of the Roman Empire.” But the sur- 
vey cannot be confined to the States of Europe; the 
States of America—of all the Americas—are like- 
wise involved. ‘True, some of us are not aware 
of it; but this is not altogether strange when we 
reflect that most people are not thrillingly alive, 
either, above the position of their Adam’s apple. 
If, as tradition has it, a piece of the forbidden fruit 
stuck in Adam’s throat, bits of the core must have 
lodged in the larnyx of hosts of his political de- 
scendants, thus affecting their mental apparatus also. 
For ampler elucidation of this matter, consult the 
Congressional Record. If some of the discussions 
therein of the League of Nations and World Court 
do not verify the foregoing statement, no other 
illustrations of our political ineptitude would be at 
all convincing. 

Seriously, however, there is one phase of the 
situation that is heartening. It is the historic; and 
the man of vision invariably makes his appeal to 
history. Look at the past, and inquire when and 
where a great and original movement ever had a 
majority on its side? All epoch-making inventions, 
for example, make their way slowly. Have not 
most great poets been crowned after the graveside 
rather than at the fireside? All introducers of new 


108 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


orders go forth alone, lost in the distance amid the 
shouts and taunts of the stay-at-homes and tradi- 
tion-idolators. But the next generation starts up 
the road built by the pathfinder. This is at once 
the lesson and inspiration of history. For within 
and behind all history is that One Who says: “Re- 
member ye not the former things, neither consider 
the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; 
now shall it spring forth; shall ye not know it? 
I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers 
in the desert.” I do wish somebody would preach 
an epoch-making, nation-quaking, political-shaping 
sermon on “The Divine Iconoclasm.” But never 
mind! Even though such a sermon may never be 
preached, God—the great and terrible and glorious 
God—will practice His heavenly iconoclasm through 
all future history even as He has through all past 
history. “Learning to read the Bible,” says Bishop 
F. J. McConnell, “is a continuous process.” Learn- 
ing to interpret God in history is likewise a con- 
tinuous process, and no stand-patter is qualified for 
the task. Now, if we are opulently human and 
thoughtful, we reverence the past, with its travail, 
and tears, and triumphs; but when the past becomes 
religious or social or political petrification, look out! 
Something big and divine and wonderful shall 
come to pass. When traditions embarrass God, 
listen for the Voice, always young, always old, be- 
cause eternal: “Behold, I will do a new thing; 
now shall it spring forth; shall ye not know it?” 

This, therefore, is the sublime fact that the Chris- 
tian minister must express, tell forth. Yet, para- 
doxically enough, within the sublimity there is the 


THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 109 


soul of an uttermost simplicity. Is not the sublimest 
Soul in history the simplest Soul in history? The 
grandeur within the simplicity of Jesus is the moral 
miracle of the ages. All the loftier currents of 
personality seem to set toward His being, even as 
a thousand streams, springing from a thousand 
water-sheds, set toward the receptive deeps of the 
ocean. And as the ocean poiselessly enters all 
streams within its vast and encompassing bosom, so 
Jesus receives all the rills and rivers of personality 
into His own being, humanizes them, and sends 
them flowing through the generations of sensitive, 
receptive souls, who keep the shores of the River 
of Time green with the beauty of God, foretelling 
the day when all the far islands of humanity shall 
be verdant and vital through the knowledge of Him 
which shall cover the earth even as the waters cover 
the sea. | 

I ask you to consider this: Within the wedded 
sublimity and simplicity of Christianity lies one of 
the secrets of its power and universality. There 
may be religions which can be understood by phi- 
losophers alone; but Christianity is not one of 
them. ‘There may be religions which appeal to a 
particular class alone; but, let me repeat, Chris- 
tianity is not one of them. It is for all as the sun 
is for all. Christianity is to the soul what space 
is to the builder. No sane builder argues about 
the existence or non-existence of space. He pre- 
pares his plans and erects his building because racial 
and individual experience has taught him that the 
building and space fit into each other. Thus, any 
wisely simple soul may assume that Christianity is 


110 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


real and proceed to build his house of being within 
its waiting spiritual spaces. Faithful to his task, 
he shall never be put to permanent intellectual or 
moral confusion. Always the wisdom of the 
wisest, Christianity may become the wonder of the 
worst. “And such also were some of you,” says 
Paul, writing to blossoming saints who were once 
burnt-out sinners. When Augustine had become a 
human morass, infested by all manner of loathsome, 
creeping things, he was rescued by the simplicity 
which is in Christ, Who finally transformed him 
into one of the great human and historic splendors 
of God. But before Augustine, was that incom- 
parable First Century with its John and Peter and 
Paul. The scholar, trying to classify these mighties, 
says that Peter determined the polity of the Church, 
John expounded its mysticism, and Paul wrought 
its philosophy. Without stressing this conclusion 
too dogmatically, consider that two of the three 
were untaught and had no social standing beyond 
that of Galilean peasants. And yet, says Harnack, 
Saint John, in whom the east of Peter and the west 
of Paul met, portrayed “the Life of eternity lived 
in the midst of time.” John combined, in a su- 
perlative degree, both the practical and mystical 
phases of Christianity. Consider, then, these four— 
out of the hundred and forty and four thousand 
harping with their harps; consider these four— 
John, Peter, Paul, and Augustine—without the 
Christ of God, and what.a difference it would have 
made to mankind! Consider, moreover, that in 
these four is illustrated the natural simplicity of the 
mind, as in Peter and John, and the natural vigor 


THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 11) 


of the mind, as in Paul and Augustine, and we have 
a concrete example of the self-adjusting capacity 
of the Christian religion to every grade of tempera- 
ment and intellect. Further research will disclose 
that this same self-adapting principle is at work in 
every age, in every land, in every tongue. 

Little wonder, therefore, that the appeal of the 
Christian ministry must ever be in the demand upon 
its devotees to see something and then tell what 
they see—if not in a plain way, at least in their 
own way. For original individuality contains the 
note of authenticity. Each of us must take the 
raw material of the universe and recreate it in our 
own image and likeness; but it can never be a 
supremely beautiful image and likeness if our own 
souls are not already being fashioned under the 
touch of the One Lord and Master. Indwelt by 
Him we shall see something in the universe, some- 
thing in history, something in the souls of men; 
and that something will always suggest its own 
deeper aim and goal—the possibility of becoming 
the Kingdom of our Lord and His Christ. See 
deep enough, said Carlyle, and you will see musi- 
cally. Well, somewhere in the heights and depths 
of being, I think vision and music must speak the 
same tongue. If so, perhaps this is the import of 
what they say: “Worthy art Thou, our Lord and 
our God, to receive the glory and the honor and 
the power: for Thou didst create all things, and 
because of Thy will they are, and were created.” 


Til 


Character and vision lead us, sequentially, to the 
third thing: The Christian minister must do some- 


112 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


thing. Activity is the normal forth-putting of 
pregnant personality; therefore, should not activity 
in the highest values and ventures be the result of 
a person who is something and sees something on 
this wonder-teeming earth? What Jesus was—that 
is the priceless heritage of the race. What Jesus 
saw—His vision of God and man and the uni- 
verse—that is the pillar of undying fire that haunts 
and illumines humanity’s darkest midnights. What 
Jesus did—Jesus Who went about doing good— 
that is the measure of every soul to whom and 
through whom the Christian ministry makes its 
high appeal. 

As in no other calling, the Christian ministry 
makes demands upon the active and passive sides 
of human nature. Perhaps the activity of the 
ministry has never been more marked than in our 
own generation. If one’s life-work is to be gauged 
by the number of things he does and is expected 
to do, then the twentieth century minister in the 
United States of America would seem to be very 
near a solution of the problem of perpetual motion. 
It is certain that the charge of quietude or quies- 
cence, if made against the average minister of our 
time, could not be sustained by the evidence in the 
case. 

Just here, it seems to me, is our glory or doom. 
Our glory if, by the grace of God, we keep our 
being centered upon the central things of our call- 
ing; our doom, if we fail to remember that triviali- 
ties may nibble away the measure and meaning of 
abounding realities. 

What, then, is the solution to this vexing prob- 


THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 113 


lem? Or is there any solution at all? I believe 
there is. It is at once old and new, apostolic and 
ageless. What many of us need, perhaps, is a 
deeper and firmer grasp of the largeness and variety 
of the service to be rendered by the Church through 
its ministry. Now, however much we may have 
gone beyond the methods of Paul—as in all Chris- 
tian grace and common sense it has been our privi- 
lege and duty to do—we have not outgrown Paul’s 
conception of the manifold wisdom of God in the 
Church. We still need to ponder over that tremen- 
dous passage in the Third of Ephesians. Without 
daring to undertake an exposition of it at this point 
in our study, just recall a few of the phrases. “The 
unsearchable riches of Christ”; here is a prospector, 
a miner of inexhaustible realms, amazed at his dis- 
covery—discovery and disclosure all in one! ‘And 
to make all men see what is the dispensation of the 
mystery which for ages hath been hid in God Who 
created all things.” “All men—all things’’—the 
universality of it! How dare we parade our crass 
literalisms, our petty nationalisms, our creedal 
squabbles, our loud-mouthed, passing fanaticisms in 
the presence of such all-inclusive verity? Why, the 
God of redemptive grace is none other than the 
God of the illimitable universe. May the cosmic 
majesty of it burn us clean of our littleness! “To 
make all men see,’—let me repeat it—“what is the 
dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath 
been hid in God Who created all things’: all sys- 
tems, all universes, all forces, all angels, all prin- 
cipalities, all powers, all human beings—“all things!’ 
Now let us read on, that we may glimpse the goal: 
8 


114 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


“To the intent that now unto the principalities and 
powers in the heavenly places might be made known 
through the Church the manifold wisdom of God.” 
Yes, manifold—‘“numerous and varied; compre- 
hending various features, kinds, functions.” Let 
us not forget it: the wisdom of God is manifold, 
and it is to be made known through the Church. 

To this manifold wisdom through the Church, 
let us add another of the great Christian concep- 
tions. It is in the Twelfth of First Corinthians, 
that wondrous vestibule to the House of Love. Or, 
changing the figure, the apostolic heights of love 
are not reached by perpendicular but by spiral 
ascents. Round and round the roads wind, each 
bringing the spiritual mountain-climber a little 
nearer the summit of reality, which is Love. With- 
in diversities of gifts, diversities of ministrations, 
diversities of workings, says Paul, there is the same 
Spirit. ‘Now ye are the body of Christ, and 
severally members thereof. And God hath set some 
in the Church, first apostles, secondly prophets, 
thirdly teachers, then miracles, then gifts of heal- 
ings, helps, governments, divers kinds of tongues. 
Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? 
are all workers of miracles? have all gifts of heal- 
ings? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret?” 
And then Paul sinks and soars—sinks below all 
deeps, soars above all heights; he has reached the 
Land of Love, which has no ups and no downs, 
no ins and no outs; for the Land of Love is the 
Home of God and all those who have the Spirit 
of Christ. 

If, then, the Christian minister and ministry must 


THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 115 


do something, surely there is abundant room for 
individual and collective endeavor within these 
apostolic and dynamic spiritual worlds. Men cannot 
exhaust them; Time cannot age them; Society can- 
not outgrow them. Human degeneration, whether 
individual, national, or international, comes through 
failure to realize them; world-progress itself comes 
only through mankind growing up to and making 
real to its inner consciousness these everlasting 
truths by which men and races live. Out of them 
issues the abiding appeal of the Christian ministry. 
When their truth possesses the human heart, men 
go even their wounded ways with the stride of 
spiritual conquerors; and this, I think, must be the 
song they hear at the back of their minds: 


“What care I for caste or creed? 
It is the deed, it is the deed. 
What for class, or what for clan? 
It is the man, it is the man.. 

Heirs of love, and joy, and woe, 
Who is high, and who is low? 
Mountain, valley, sky, and sea 
Are for all humanity. 


What care I for robe or stole? 

It is the soul, it is the soul. 

What for crown, or what for crest? 
It is the heart within the breast ; 

It is the faith, it is the hope, 

It is the struggle up the slope. 

It is the brain and eye to see 

One God, and one humanity.” 


VI 
THE GOD OF SUCCESS* 


“But Herod the tetrarch, being reproved by him for 
his brother Philip’s wife, and for all the evils which 
Herod had done, added yet this above all, that he shut 
up John in prison.’—LukE 3:19, 20. 


M ANY people have learned to spell it with 


a small “g.” Believing that success is 

synonymous with three meals a day, a fat 
bank account, a high-powered automobile, a good 
time, a world from which aches and pains have been 
banished by the magic of mystery and the brazen- 
ness of ignorance, these uproarious devotees of the 
external, the infernal, the occult, the subconscious, 
and the unconscious are proclaiming “the new sal- 
vation” with a zeal which captivates the innocent 
and dazzles the unsuspecting. 

But it is allin vain. The God of Success refuses 
to have His great and glorious Name spelled with 
small letters, though they should resemble gold or 
fame or popularity or even psycho-analysis. As 
the Kingdom of God is not meat and drink, so the 
Hill of Success is not ascended by the superficially 
clever, the mentally bright, the morally inane, or 
the spiritually wan and cold. Consequently, I think 
it might be wholesomely invigorating for us to turn 


*Preached in the First Congregational Church, San Francisco, Sunday 
morning, July 13, 1924. 
116 


THE GOD OF SUCCESS 117 


away, for a little, from the false gods of success 
and seek that One Who said and still says: ‘Thou 
shalt have no other gods before Me.” And this, 
I think, is what our text invites us to do. For 
Herod may shut up John in prison; but he cannot 
shut up John; he merely lifts John into a position 
to talk about Herod and his followers as long as 
time shall last. 


I 


We have in the first of these three characters 
the failure that looks like failure. ‘“Herodias his 
brother’s wife.” Some things are so ugly that we 
need no argument to prove their ugliness. Herodias — 
is one of these human things. Once, when Herod 
was in Rome, she fell in with her brother-in-law, 
and the twain were soon bound together in the 
bonds of iniquity. An adulteress, a murderess, at 
once the sister-in-law and niece of her royal para- 
mour, Herodias blackens the spiritual sky like some 
vast vulture, poisons the atmosphere like some 
deadly plant. Even to mention her name is to recall 
a whole company of sinister women—Clytemnestra, 
Cleopatra, Jezebel, Lady Macbeth, Madame Pompa- 
dour—a terrible group of venomous females! 


Visualizing, as Herodias does, the slimy, the 
vulgar, the painted, the pampered, the tawdry, the 
tinseled, do we need to linger long over this portrait 
of failure that looks like failure? One would think 
that, in itself, there is something so repulsive as 
to make its warning agelessly effective. But alas! 
it is not so. Loosen the bonds of moral restraint, 
break the ties which bind womanhood to God and 


1188 THE OUNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


home and purity, and of all the black tragedies en- 
acted beneath the merciful heavens, this is the 
blackest. Moreover, the degradation of woman- 
hood always brings the judgment-dooms of God 
upon individuals and nations ominously nearer. 
Terrible as the decay of manhood is and must be, 
the degeneracy of womanhood is even manyfold 
more disastrous. Personally, I do not believe in 
the false and unjust double standards of society. 
The same high practices should be demanded of 
men that we demand of women. And yet I know, 
and you know, when womanhood sets the down- 
ward pace to doom, it is all the more monstrous 
just because the deed is done by woman. It is not 
only woman’s doom to be more beautiful than man; 
she must also be more dutiful, more moral, more re- 
ligious, more Christlike. Carrying within her own 
soul these finer seeds of loveliness, it is required 
of her, by a kind of unwritten and yet very real 
law, that she produce a crop of virtues which man, 
in his limitations, seems incapable of. This is not 
to conclude, however, that morality is a matter of 
sex—male or female; it is simply the forthright 
recognition of a fact which right-thinking people 
will not allow to become obscured. 

Is there anything in the womanhood of our day 
to remind us of Herodias—of the failure that looks 
like failure? Verily, there is! I believe that there 
are more fine women in the world today than ever 
before in history. And there are many, to speak 
temperately, who are not so fine. In the New Testa- 
ment—the greatest book in all the world—such 
women are characterized, sometimes, as “silly.” 


THE GOD OF SUCCESS 119 


These are they who think more of paint than of 
purity, more of vulgarity than of virtue, more of 
pearls than of principles, more of adornment than 
of adoration, more of hats than of holiness, more 
of dress than of duty, more of mirrors than of 
manners. No just indictment may be made against 
“style” as such. Indeed, there are excellent reasons 
why beauty and good taste should always have place 
in the attire of both women and men. But when 
the style-chaser falls victim to the style-maker, then 
does style itself become a kind of nightmare while 
decency is sacrificed on the altar of degradation. 
Thus do the words of Saint James describe the con- 
dition of many a woman in our own time: “She 
that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.” 
What a picture these ten words contain! Is it 
not a close-up of death in veneer? Essentially dead 
while she is apparently alive—that is the fact ex- 
hibited by the life of every Herodias, no matter 
what her environment, or epoch, or creed. Being 
in France in 1717, Peter the Great visited Madame 
de Maintenon, a former prostitute of Louis XIV. 
She was now eighty-three years old and living in 
the convent she had founded after the King’s death. 
Drawing aside the curtains of the bed on which 
she lay, Peter asked: “Of what disease do you 
suffer?” “Of old age,” replied the erstwhile royal 
harlot. Now, old age may not only be venerable; 
it may foretell the approach of the Spring Eternal; 
beneath its white there may be the green of the 
youth that knows not age. But what lay behind 
this old age? Was it merely a “disease” superin- 
duced by fourscore Summers and Winters? Hard- 


120 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


ly! For behind that disease named old age is that 
other and worse malady named spiritual death. In 
that first quarter of the eighteenth century, Europe: 
was in the throes of gambling and lust. Says a 
historian: ‘The kings gambled, the queens gambled, 
the nobles gambled, the priests gambled, the com- 
mons gambled. There are well-authenticated in- 
stances in which the mourners played cards on the 
coffin of the deceased on the way to the cemetery.” 
They that live in pleasure are dead while they lve— 
that is God’s judgment upon the failure that looks 
like failure. 

Going through a department store, one woman 
remarked to another: “I want something cheap and 
good-looking.” Now, very few men have the heart 
to criticize the joy and thrill experienced by femi- 
nism when assembled on bargain-counter day. I 
must confess, however, that while standing at a 
reasonably safe distance, I have had a sort of mental 
reversion to type, as it were, and fancied myself 
in the midst of some of the social or religious rites 
practiced by American Indians. Well, something 
“cheap and good-looking” at the bargain-counter 
may be all right; but when something “cheap and 
good-looking’ gets into the blood, creeps into our 
moral stream, look out! For there are two forces 
unalterably opposed to any such thing. They are 
God and human nature. There is a divine and ever- 
lasting opposition to what is merely cheap and good- 
looking. It could not be otherwise in a moral order; 
God—just because He is God—is actively and in- 
evitably against everything that hurts human be- 
ings. The second opposition resides in human na- 


THE GOD OF SUCCESS 121 


ture itself. Men and women, though every drop 
of their blood becomes so polluted as to produce 
eyes that look downward, can not always come to 
terms with what is “cheap and good-looking.” 
There is an irreducible grandeur in the human soul, 
created by God and guarded by Him, that, when 
dragged down into the lowest hell, must still reckon 
with the indestructible and immortal—the soulhood 
made in the Divine Image. What inner explosions, 
what purging fires may be necessary to consume 
what is only morally cheap and good-looking, God 
alone, in His wisdom and redemptive passion, has 
the right to say. Meantime, every mortal of us, 
while it is yet day and the sun of opportunity is 
still shining, should nerve our soul to seek and 
follow the Light of the World, that we may be 
saved from that vulgar, sordid, Herodias-failure 
that looks like failure, standing, 


“With hell in her heart and death in her hand 
Daring the doom of the unknown land.” 


II 


Our text exposes a second view of the philosophy 
of success. It is in ‘Herod the tetrarch.” He em- 
bodies the failure that looks like success. We pos- 
sessed his father’s genius for building; he also in- 
herited from his infamous sire the provinces of 
Galilee and Paraea, founding the town of Tiberias, 
with its flavor of Greek culture, on the west shore 
of the Sea of Galilee. In brief, Herod was the in- 
carnation of push, pomp, and power. He was a 
strange mixture of the forces named heredity, 


122 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


politics, cunning, greed, creed, and conscience. For 
about the best thing in Herod seems to be the 
faintest flicker of the fading fire of conscience. The 
majesty of John the Baptist evidently touched the 
meanness of Herod into something akin to whole- 
some fear. True, it was not strong enough to with- 
stand the tigerlike fierceness of Herodias in her 
hatred of the prophet of God; but, let us not for- 
get, that Herod the tetrarch had momentary flashes 
when he might have seen life and seen it whole. 

Well, is there not a certain bleak tragedy, too, 
in the failure that looks like success? This is the 
kind of failure that dogs the steps of all of us. 
There is something subtle and snakelike in its glit- 
tering, hypnotic power. And it is the brand that 
is almost universally heralded today. Like an at- 
mosphere, this gospel of success makes its strong, 
silent pressure felt in every walk of life. Its key- 
note is bulk or bigness. Big talk, big dividends, big 
cities, big congregations, big armies, big circulation, 
big cars, big buildings, big—well, big everything! 
I think if some doctor were to visit us from an- 
other planet and made an honest diagnosis of our 
case, he would say that we had been keenly stung 
by the bug of bigness. 

In a certain city I watched a boy spinning his top. 
He was a crippled lad, all crumpled up and twisted 
together in knots of pain. He moved himself along 
the pavement by a wagon, which he managed in a 
skillful manner. Stretched almost prone in his little 
vehicle, he would throw a top onto the street and 
make it spin like a planet in the spaces. Why, the 
whole thing was done so wonderfully that I just 


THE GOD/OF SUCGESS 123 


had to stop and look. Moreover, the lad’s face was 
as lovely as the morning itself. To see him smile 
as he placed his rhythmic toy anywhere he chose 
was a means of grace. Many times did he spin his 
top for my enjoyment. At last, when I slipped a 
coin into his hand, he paid me with a look of delight 
that outshone the lustre of diamonds. So he went 
on spinning his top as I went on my way to preach 
the sermon he gave me. 

That very noontime, in a great club of that city, 
a company of commercial and industrial kings sat 
down to lunch. Some were bankers, some were 
railway operators, some were publishers, some were 
mining engineers, some were steel and iron mag- 
nates, some were realtors—men who play a neces- 
sary part in the civilization of the twentieth century. 
They have a genius for transacting business, and 
they do it on an immense scale. Giving employment 
to thousands, they are among our modern giants 
sent forth to wrestle with matter and shape it into 
useful ends for human welfare. No sane person 
questions the honor, the serviceableness, the human- 
ity, the high-mindedness of many of these men. 
They are not horribly wicked just because they 
visualize what is popularly known as success. In 
the main, they are serious-minded men, energeti- 
cally set about the accomplishment of worthful tasks 
in a world of work. 

And yet, if there is nothing more than this; if 
making and building and hauling and digging and 
buying and selling—if these constitute the summum 
bonum of human beings, all rounded with a sleep 
and mounded with a handful of dust, then are not 


124 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


these capable, clever, industrious, twentieth century 
citizens top-spinners also? In no mere figurative 
sense, are they not the devotees, yea, the victims, of 
the failure that looks like success? 

Once there was a youth resolved on succeeding 
in life—a right noble resolve, and one every mortal 
should entertain, provided his idea of success is 
big enough, worthy of an immortal soul. For- 
tunately, there was a wise man—the Seer, as he 
was affectionately called—living in the same com- 
munity. People, especially young people, loved him 
and considered it a privilege to “have out’ their 
problems with him. So, haunted by the ghost of 
a false success, the youth said: “I will talk it over 
with the Seer.” Four things the young man had 
resolved to do in life. ‘First of all,’ he said, after 
the Seer had welcomed him into his Place of Quiet, 
“T am going to obtain a first-class education.” 
“Good,” replied the Seer, with enthusiasm. “And 
what then?” “Then I am going to the city where 
sO many ways of success are always open.” “Per- 
haps that may be well,” said the Seer. “And what 
then?” That whip-crack question came sharp and 
searching as each successive step was disclosed. 
“Well, then,” said the youth, “I shall probably think 
of marrying and making a home.” “And what 
then?’ came the same challenging interrogation, 
with deepening emphasis upon the last word. “By 
that time,’ replied the youth, “I suppose that I 
shall be more and more engrossed in building up 
my fortune, or, as it is sometimes expressed, in 
making my pile.” The young man’s face flushed a 
bit as he uttered these words. But once again the 


THE GOD OF SUCCESS 125 


Seer, with a mystic fire dancing in his eye and a 
new meaning thrilling through his voice, asked: 
“And what then?” Plainly, the youth was em- 
barrassed. It began to dawn upon him that his 
program, after all, was scarcely large enough; and 
in that hour, let us believe, he began to conceive a 
worthier criterion of success. 

My friends, should not the Seer’s question be 
fairly burnt into the consciousness of our age? 
When things climb into the saddle and ride man- 
kind; when “getting on” in the world becomes the 
norm of being; when success cults fatten their 
finances at the expense of common sense and com- 
mon, honesty; when the lure of luxury and the evil 
of extravagance threaten to blind multitudes to the 
blazing ubiquities of conscience and character, is it 
not high time we are facing once again this ques- 
tion: “And what then?” 

James Bryce said that Lord Acton was the most 
truly cosmopolitan of Englishmen, that Europe it- 
self regarded him, by universal consent, in the fore- 
most rank of her men of learning. Well, it was 
this same Lord Acton who, in his inaugural lecture 
as Professor of History at Cambridge University, 
said: “Jt ts the office of historical science to main- 
tain morality as the sole impartial criterion of men 
and things.’ Ah, that is what we modern people, 
busy with our business and noisy with our national- 
isms, need to grasp with a spiritual tenacity which 
will not let go. Otherwise, we shall doom our- 
selves to the fate of blind Samsons grinding in the 
mills of a remorseless materialism. 

In the essay to which I have referred, Mr. Bryce 


1246. THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


tells of a conversation he had with Lord Acton at 
the latter’s home at Cannes. It was late at night, 
says Bryce, and the great scholar discoursed for 
about six or seven minutes on how a history of 
liberty might be written. ‘The eloquence was 
splendid,” he continues, “but greater than the elo- 
quence was the penetrating vision which discerned 
through all events and in all ages the play of those 
moral forces, now creating, now destroying, always 
transmuting, which had moulded and remoulded in- 
stitutions, and had given to the human spirit its 
ceaselessly-changing forms of energy. It was as 
if the whole landscape of history had been sud- 
denly lit up by a burst of sunlight.” 

What a speaker and what an audience assembled 
yonder in that “silence of the sleep-time!”’ I never 
saw Lord Acton, but I have seen James Bryce and 
heard him speak. The wisdom of his speech proved 
that he was a great and eloquent listener. And 
what was the subject of that memorable discourse 
of the celebrated scholar? ‘The play of moral 
forces’’—that is the subject, finally, of every thinker 
of the first order. And it is this, and this alone, 
that lights up the whole landscape of history with 
bursts of sunlight. Therefore, neither Herodias— 
incarnation of the failure that looks like failure— 
nor Herod—exemplar of the failure that looks like 
success—shall be able to stand with the realities that 
abide when all shams are tried by fire, and oul the 
fire remains. 


iil 


There is a third figure moving majestically about 
in our text. “He shut up John in prison.” Never 


THE GOD OF SUCCESS 127 


mind, now, about Herodias, or Herod, or the prison. 
This man John has something to say that men will 
hear as long as they have any hearing. And what 
is the theme of John’s speech? Why, John pro- 
claims the failure that is success. 

Behold John—he of whom the Master said: 
“Among them that are born of women there hath 
not arisen a greater than John the Baptist.” Rob- 
ertson of Brighton, with the insight of genius, em- 
phasizes the three things that thrust John into 
prison. In his rebuke of Herod, the prophet is an 
example of straightforwardness—he does not mince 
his words when condemning wickedness in high 
places; of unconsciousness—he does not say, “‘Lis- 
ten, as I give this Herod a needed scolding”; of 
unselfishness—he had nothing to gain and life it- 
self to lose by doing his duty. This, then, is John— 
straightforward, unconscious, unselfish. 

Looking a little closer, various strains and tones, 
it seems, enter into the making of this sublime man. 
There is, first of all, the mystic. For thirty years 
John had gone to God’s school in the desert. The 
color of the ground, the light of dawn, the heat 
of noon, the fire of sunset, the wailing wind, the 
viper wriggling through the grass, the desert sand 
stretching along its own gray waste, the wild beast 
with its howl and hunger and rage, the vulture that 
blackened the sky like a winged scavenger—yea, 
the desert, with its gray, creeping, running, flying 
creatures, had gone into John’s blood. I think the 
desert had imparted to John’s eye the flash and 
vision of uncourtly, lonely, far-off things. The 


128 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


desert was John’s altar and thereon he sacrificed to 
the living God. 

Next we see John as the minister. Out of the 
inmost soul of things the mystic is wrought into 
God’s prophet. At last John comes forth not with 
a book but with a soul that makes books. John was 
not a reviewer of what others have said; he was 
a reviewer of what God is saying. It will take 
some of us, I fear, a long time to see the difference. 
But even when John the Mystic has become John 
the Minister, there are many, many things he does 
not know. If he did, what would be the use of 
faith? To know everything would be to negative, 
turn into sheer disuse, the mightiest power God 
has placed at the disposal of mortals—the power of 
faith. So John the Minister, when Herod shut him 
up in prison, hears the croakings of the raven of 
doubt. Yet even the sickness of doubt may have 
its compensating recuperations if we take it into 
the presence of the Christ. 

Look once again at John, and this mystic-minister 
is a martyr. MHerodias gets her revenge while 
Herod gets a deeper stain of blood upon the gar- 
ments of his soul. The pawn of fate, apparently, 
John pays blood down for the privilege of wit- 
nessing unto the truth. While some forsook and 
some denied, he went his lonely way, thinking his 
long, long thoughts. 

Now, I suggested at the outset of our study, the 
God of Success may be spelled with either small or 
capital letters. To spell it with little letters means 
little, false judgments and ideals. As we spell it, 
so we are. If we accept the conventional and popu- 


THE GOD OF SUCCESS 129 


lar notion that success is the “attainment of a pro- 
posed object, as wealth, position, or the like,” we 
shall never climb God’s holy hill of spiritual great- 
ness. If, on the other hand, we are resolved to 
make things the servants of the soul; if we con- 
sider life the privilege of manifesting the meaning 
of the Cross; if, blinded though we ofttimes are 
by the dust and dirt flying from the ever-building 
Temple of Truth, we still have eyes for the unseen 
and eternal; if, as the scholar says, “we maintain 
morality as the sole impartial criterion of men and 
things’; if, moreover, we see to it that our morality 
is fired by faith in Christ, lest our souls be fed upon 
philosophic or theologic crumbs rather than upon 
the Bread of God; if, living or dying, in sickness 
or health, in poverty or prosperity, in good report 
or evil, we follow on to know the Lord, even though 
such knowledge should stretch us prone upon our 
cross of defeat and death, we shall find ourselves 
at last on the side of God, on the side of the angels, 
on the side of the prophets and martyrs, on the 
side of the faithful out of all climes and times— 
yea, on the side of Him Who says: “My sheep 
know My voice, and I know them, and they follow 
Me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they 
shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them 
out of My hand.” 

No; my friends, there is no true success that 
fails to reckon with the Cross. And the Cross is 
God’s way with the soul because it is God’s way 
with Himself. “God so loved the world that He 
gave His only begotten Son.” This is the wonder 


that never grows old; this is the truth that the 
A , 


130 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


souls of men must have; and it is my conviction 
that, finally, they will close with no other, even 
‘though they may perish in refusing this. Like 
Stevenson, if we wake in hell, we may still believe 
in an ultimate decency of things; but there can be 
no ultimate decencies in Hell or Heaven without 
the power of the Cross—the Love that will not let 
us go—because He Whose Name is Love is set on 
making all souls Christlike lovers. 

So I, too, proclaim the God of Success unto you, 
but I spell His Name with capital letters. Once a 
man went through our country writing poems for 
his bread. He wrote a poem for every home that 
kept open house to him. But sometimes this mod- 
ern Homer, begging his bread with bits of beauty, 
was mistreated. Finally, he came upon a man liv- 
ing in a cabin in the woods. He proved to be an 
unknown Greatheart. ‘This is what I came out 
into the wilderness to see,” says the Poet. ‘This 
man had nothing, and gave me half of it, and we 
both had abundance.” It is Love’s way, whether in 
mansion or wilderness. It is the way of true suc- 
cess. 

This morning I stood once again by the tomb of 
Thomas Starr King. San Francisco may well be 
proud of her great preacher and patriot. Yonder 
monument in Golden Gate Park fittingly bespeaks 
your appreciation of this minstrel and prophet. 
Someone said that no heart ever ached because of 
him until he died. “God,” he once declared, “‘is the 
Infinite Christ. Jesus revealed under human limi- 
tations the mercy and love of the Father.” Great 
soul! Pure heart! Mighty mind! Dying, he said: 


THE GOD OF SUCCESS 131 


“T see a great future before me. Tell my friends 
that I went lovingly, trustfully, peacefully.” Then, 
as Thomas Starr King left the City by the Golden 
Gate for the City with Gates of Gold, he repeated, 
softly: ‘The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not 
want.” 

An older man than King—more massive, more 
mountain-like of proportion—lay dying yonder at 
Marshfield a few years before. Like a vast ship 
that has outridden many a storm, the soul of Daniel 
Webster—the greatest orator in history and one of 
its supreme intellects—is coming in out of the night, 
drenched to the quick with the bleak, bitter rains of 
Time. But, like Carlyle, Eternity had already be- 
come Webster’s strong city. So, as this colossal 
human lays aside his vestments of clay, that Night- 
ingale of the Psalms begins to sing in his heart, as 
he, too, whispers: “The Lord is my shepherd: I 
shall not want.” 

Thus did the Atlantic and the Pacific kiss each 
other in these two kingly souls; three thousand 
miles of space are melted into the moulds of spirit; 
time itself became no more as Webster and King 
breathed their souls back to God to the undying 
tune of the singer of olden years: “The Lord is 
my shepherd: I shall not want.” Any success that 
fails, finally, of this divine criterion, is not the suc 
cess the soul of man was created to enjoy. 


VII 
CHRIST'S NEW LAW * 


“TI give you a new command, that you love one an- 
other—as I have loved you, that you also love one 
another. By this shall all men know that you are My 
Ere you have love one to another.’—JouN 
13: 34, 35. 


Y WAY of preéminence, the upper room, in 
B which the Master spoke these words, has be- 

come the whispering gallery of Heaven let 
down, Jacob’s ladder-like, upon the earth. In that 
hour a new edition of thought came from the whirl- 
ing presses of matter, space, and time. All that the 
. universe had been striving to say so long and had 
never found a fit instrument of expression for—all 
the yearning at the heart of things at last blossomed 
into speech, becoming articulate in the words of our 
Lord and Master. Great is the man who learns and 
tells how atoms and stars are held together. Great 
is the man who learns how colors blend and paints 
a picture immortal. Great is the man who listens 
to harmonies unheard and then woos them into the 
land of melody. But greater, far greater by all the 
diameters of being, is that One who heard the Heart 
of Love beating and breaking through the heart of 
things, and then told what He heard in language as 





Ngee in the First Presbyterian Church, New York, March 8, 
1925. 
132 


CHRIST’S NEW LAW 133 


simple as the speech of childhood, and lived it, also, 
in deeds as sublime as stars in their courses. Let 
us think, therefore, of Christ’s New Law. It will 
answer more questions, soothe more heartaches, 
correct more misunderstandings, create more joy, 
dry more tears, foster more efficient industrial re- 
lations, solve more individual, national, and inter- 
national problems than any power or wisdom yet 
released into the ways of men and society. 


I 


Consider, first, in what sense this law is new. 
For if we really believe in God, there is a sense in 
which it is not new at all. Our Master’s law of 
love is as old as the nature of God. ‘God is love; 
God so loved; we love, because He first loved us.” 
These are a few flashes out of the Sun of Love, 
which suggest that love is as old as God, and, con- 
sequently, as agelessly new as the Divine amid His 
worlds. 


And yet, our question is necessary: In what sense 
is our Lord’s law of love new? I think the answer , 
is at hand. First, it is new in the quality of person 
uttering it. “J’—that is the central fact—‘I give 
you a new command.” We shall never get away, 
even if we desired, from the wonder and mystery of 
personality. For personality, in its least attractive 
expression, is still more unfathomable than a whole 
universe of material elements. Matter in itself is 
mysterious enough, but when matter embodies 
mind, when mind functions through matter, there 
comes into being one of the illimitable creations that 


134 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


thinking persons stand in awe of. I am not think- 
ing now of the greater, the sublimer editions of per- 
sonality—such as Moses, or Confucius, or Plato, or 
Rembrandt, or Beethoven. That little, pale, frail, 
undeveloped specimen of personality—‘“with no 
language but a cry’’—that, I say, is a uniquer crea- 
tion than the star-hung spaces. 

But when we reflect upon personality in its 
noblest embodiment, then, indeed, do we begin to 
take off our mental shoes. And is not that what we 
are compelled to do when we see the light of the 
Eternal Mind blazing through matter-molded forms 
and listen to words that bloom out of the dust of 
things? “J give you a new command.” All that 
Sinai tried to say and could not; all that Isaiah 
dreamed and dreaming on, died, with his dreams 
unfulfilled: all that the harps of Greek and Hebrew 
melodists strove to sing,—here, at last, law and 
dream and song are embodied, moving about the 
haunts of men, telling them that their visions are 
true, but too small; that the reality goes beyond the 
ideal. The quality of person uttering this law, I 
insist, is altogether unique. Sometimes men follow 
a stream that is not always visible. Here it flows 
through the open spaces, reflecting its silver en- 
chantment; there it goes through the wooded tracts, 
half concealed amid the golden glooms; but yonder 
it goes, and where? Why, the stream is no longer 
visible, it is lost to view, winding about in the dark, 
underground. How do men then track the course 
of their lost stream? Why by the verdure—clean, 
sweet, and April-kissed — growing immediately 
above the sunken stream. Thus, somewhat, the 


CHRIST’S NEW LAW 135 


River of God’s Love has always been flowing across 
and over and under the world; but that unique, par- 
ticular, and verdurous expanse of loveliness cast up 
by the sunken river of love Divine—that is the Lord 
Christ. “I give you a new command.” And just 
as a river—visible or invisible—is always giving, 
so, too, the Master gives with riverlike bountiful- 
ness. He gives His new law to the universe of 
created intelligences as naturally as a river gives 
greenness and beauty to the plant life along its 
shores or rooted in its bosom. 

There is a second answer to the sense in which 
this law is new. It is new in the kind of character 
it produces. The true Christian is a new species in 
the gardens of time. This fact is so extraordinary 
that comparatively few of us ever seriously regard 
it at all. Moreover, the achievement of Christlike 
character is so rare that, when achieved, men have 
a right to exclaim: “Here, indeed, is one of God’s 
human gods come down to dwell upon the earth.” 
But why such extraordinariness and rarity? Just 
because the Christian type of character is so diffi- 
cult of attainment. Most of us, I suppose, are 
Christianized in spots. We have our intermittent 
hours of unselfishness, of big dreams of big deeds; 
of the high hills of purpose calling down to our low 
valleys of performance; but the long, steady, uphill 
pull and sacrificial, love-girded way—how inconse- 
quentially most people fit their clumsy feet into 
that! Our wills are as uncertain as the March 
winds, and quite as uproarious when crossed. Our 
outlook upon the vast, teeming world extends about 
as far as the back yard fence,—if the day is per- 


136 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


fectly clear. Our resolution to be kind and tolerant 
lasts until the fundamentalist or modernist in us is 
challenged by the Christlike; and then our theol- 
ogies and philosophies, old and new, take wings 
and fly away, giving place to the imp of suspicion 
and unbrotherliness. 

And why are we so easily tripped up in these 
matters? It is not enough to answer: Because we 
are human and poor worms of the dust! Even poor 
worms plow their furrows deep, in preparation for 
the crops of God. Our failure, I think, is largely 
here: We have never realized that the Christian is 
a new type of human—an offshoot from the Vine 
of God, blooming over the walls of humanity. The 
Good Lord deliver us all from that smug, easy-go- 
ing, conventional kind of discipleship that functions 
one day in seven, and scarcely one hour of that one 
day! The Good Lord deliver us, also, from that 
colorless kind of religion that makes much of the 
particular color of the skin behind which it color- 
lessly hides, as if the very heart of God Himself 
were somehow red or black or white or yellow! 
The Christian God is not a Nordic creation. | 

No, my friends, to be a Christian is the hardest 
task God, the Father Almighty, has set for mortal 
minds, wills, and hearts. And when one of these 
great-strided souls comes marching down the road- 
ways of the world, are not men thrillingly aware 
that something new and unusual has been released 
out of the heavens? Consider that first disciple 
band. It was not their cleverness, but their Christ- 
likeness, that out-lived, out-loved, out-willed, and 
out-thought the hard, pagan world, on which, ac- 


CHRIST’S NEW LAW 137 


cording to Arnold, disgust and secret loathing fell. 
And always, the dreary centuries through, when 
some Francis of Assissi, or some Booth of London, 
or some Livingstone of Africa, or some Brainerd 
of America, or some Mary Slessor of Caliabar, has 
trodden the path of the Divine otherism, over and 
over again the after-glow of the Eternal Christ has 
made the human skies more glorious than the after- 
glow of the sunset heavens, burning with altar fires 
kindled in cosmic furnaces. We ordinary people 
need a truer understanding and a finer practice of 
what it means to be a disciple, a scholar in the 
school of Christ. Such a realization would make 
our ordinary world to pulse with the power of our 
extraordinary and all-glorious Lord, functioning 
through wills set to do the will of God on earth, 
even as it is done in Heaven. 

There is still a third answer concerning the new- 
ness of Christ’s new law. It is new in its method 
for transforming the world. “I give you a new 
command, to love one another—as I have loved you, 
you are to love one another.” “But,” you say again, 
“love is not new, love is as old as God. ‘Therefore, 
love is older than the morning stars that sang to- 
gether at the creation.” And you are right—only 
you are not right enough in the deeper interpreta- 
tion of love. While love always was, love never 
had a chance to fully express itself in the world of 
human beings and human relationships, until the 
Lord Christ took up the harp of life and smote on 
all its chords—not with might, but with love, which 
is infinitely mightier than might. So, the Master 
does not say, merely, that all disciples are to love 


138 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


one another; for men, women, and children have 
always loved one another the world around, the 
ages long. To be sure, they have loved imperfectly, 
but they have loved, nevertheless. What the Mas- 
ter says is this: “As I have loved you, you are to 
love one another.” Ah! therein is the unfailing 
newness of it all! Who ever loved on this earth as 
Christ loved those first disciples? Never before 
was love so wisely, patiently, discriminatingly, 
heartbreakingly humanized, because never before 
had love ever found an instrument whereby to utter 
forth its whole Divine and human self. But now, 
in the fullness of the times and the eternities, love 
has found an organ fine enough, rich enough, strong 
enough, tender enough, wise enough, tearful 
enough, dying enough, deathless enough, to utter 
all its wailing minors and wooing majors. “As I 
have loved you.” Here is the sun at the center of 
God’s new human solar system. 

“But tell me,” you demand, “how could mere 
mortals, beset by hate and prejudice and ignorance 
and sin, ever hope to love like Christ?” That is a 
tremendous question, a just one, and it requires a 
great answer. ‘Therefore, the Lord of the Soul 
must give His own answer; I cannot, I dare not. 
“You will understand on that day,” He says, “that 
I am in my Father and you are in Me and I am in 
you.” Mystical? Yes, very, but life is mystical, 
mysterious, and majestic. Here is a buried root. 
The sun away off in the spaces says: ‘Oh, root, you 
must grow a stock! The stock must push through 
the soil; then branches must come, and then bud 
and bloom and fruit.” But the buried root protests: 


’ CHRIST’S NEW LAW 139 


“It is all so strange, so mysterious, so impossible.” 
And then the sun whispers: “Nothing is impossible, 
little root. I will be in you, you will be in me, and, 
thus giving and receiving light, we will grow and 
unfold and bloom and be fruitful together.’’ So the 
sun-energy and the root-response produce together 
their luscious fruit. 

Take a human fact: Fathers and Mothers so love 
themselves into the lives of their children that chil- 
dren wear their ancestral and hereditary habits like 
a garment. Parenthood is in the child and child- 
hood is in the parenthood—so in-wrought are they 
that nothing is able to deface, entirely, the resem- 
blance of children and parents. Lying behind and 
working through all laws of heredity and environ- 
ment is the living God, even the Father of our Lord 
and Saviour Jesus Christ. When God in Christ 
shines into human beings, the very roots of human- 
ity begin to quiver with new power and the law of 
Christian resemblance is fulfilled. ‘‘We all, be- 
holding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are 
changed into the same image from glory to glory, 
even as from the Spirit of the Lord.” 


II 


Consider, secondly, that Christ’s new law is the 
final test of discipleship. We should proceed very 
judiciously at this point. “By this’—by what? 
Why, by loving one another as I have loved you! 
Here, then, is the absolute norm of the Christian. 
“But it all seems so simple and easy,’ someone 
affirms. Nobody who has really tried it and under- 


140 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


stands its implications has found it simple and easy. 
It is crucial and sublime—so great, indeed, that the 
best of us never master more than the alphabet of 
love’s language. In this day of autobiographies, 
men may read their anti-biographies, if they have a 
mind to. It is all there in the Master’s life and 
teaching, and in First-Corinthians Thirteen. The 
whole vast conception is so contrary to the ordinary 
ways of human thought and action that some of us, 
summoning ourselves before this bewildering judg- 
ment-bar of God, wonder if we have any right what- 
ever to the name of Christian. 

The law of Christian love easy? Why, every- 
thing else—all attainments and possessions whatso- 
ever—are by comparison veritable gewgaws and 
artificialities. Without love, we may speak with 
the tongues of men and angels, and still be as noisy 
gongs and clanging cymbals. That is easy to miss, 
hard to attain. Wauthout love, we may prophesy, 
fathom all mysteries and secret lore, have such ab- 
solute faith as to remove hills from their place, and 
still count for nothing. That is easy to miss, hard 
to attain. Without love, we may distribute all our 
possessions in charity, and give up our bodies to be 
burnt, and still make nothing of it. That is easy to 
miss, hard to attain. 

Negatively, love knows no jealousy, makes no 
parade, gives itself no airs, is never rude, never 
selfish, never irritable, never resentful, never glad 
when others go wrong, always slow to expose. 
Positively, love is very patient, very kind, is glad- 
dened by goodness, always eager to believe the best, 
always hopeful, always patient. These white 


CHRIST’S NEW LAW 141 


heights in the land of love, I repeat, are easy to 
miss, hard to climb. Yet, “by this,” says the Mas- 
ter, “and not by anything else, comes the ultimate 
test of discipleship.” 

Certain questions emerge just here—questions re- 
lating to Christ’s new law in State and Church. 
“Am I not a Christian,” asks one, “by virtue of my 
being a citizen of a Christian nation?’ The late 
Justice Brewer, of the Supreme Court of the United 
States, wrote a volume declaring the United States 
a Christian nation. He emphasizes the fact that 
“all the early Colonial charters expressed the pur- 
pose of the pioneer immigrants and the wish of the 
consenting sovereign to found Christian civil com- 
munities upon the North American Continent.” 
The Roman Catholics in Maryland, the Puritans in 
Massachusetts, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the 
Hugenots in South Carolina—all alike desired to 
found Christian civil communities. Moreover, in 
one of the two oldest American written constitu- 
tions are the words: “We all came into these parts 
of America to enjoy the liberty of the Gospel in 
purity and peace.” Is it not a high and holy thing 
to remember that this nation, under God and righte- 
ous men, was conceived and brought forth in the 
spirit and purpose of Christianity ? 

And yet, Christ’s new law is so far-reaching and 
regenerative in its personal and social bearings, go- 
ing in behind all charters and constitutions, that no 
thoughtful person would seriously regard himself as 
a member of the Kingdom of God on account of 
citizenship in a so-called Christian nation. “By 
this,’ not by patriotism—for “patriotism is not 


142 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


enough,” said Edith Cavell, in the presence of death 
—that you love one another, even as I have loved 
you, shall men be made aware of your discipleship. 

The second question has to do with the church. 
“Am I not a Christian, because of membership in 
the church?” The best way to answer some ques- 
tions is to ask them. ~They are verbal cafeterias— 
self-helping and self-answering. Now, it is a 
serious and beautiful act to assume the vows of 
Church membership; and multitudes are cheating 
themselves and denying definite obligations to so- 
ciety by refusing to do so. Still, church member- 
ship is not the last word in discipleship; it is much 
easier to be churchmen than to be Christians; much 
easier to be concerned about “the five points” than 
it is to sun ourselves in the radiance of the five re- 
alties—the Fatherhood of God, the Saviourhood of 
Christ, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Life 
Eternal, and the Universal Kingdom. 

Francis Bacon held that one of the authentic 
stamps of the thinker is to be able to perceive the 
resemblances in things, and also to perceive the dif- 
ferences in things. ‘That, it seems to me, is what 
the Master invariably does. And in our text, He 
lays bare the method and power whereby the faded 
and fading world of humanity may take on a spir- 
itual and unaging greenness. Have you considered 
the oak tree during these March days? Coming 
through Indiana last week, 1 saw groves of oak 
trees set in stainless fields of snow. ‘The enchant- 
ing thing to me about the oak tree is the tenacious 
hold it keeps upon its leaves. When most of the 
other trees; even “the seven sister-poplars that go 


CHRIST’S NEW LAW 143 


softly in a line,” have shed their leaves and become 
“bare ruined choirs,” the oak still counts his cling- 
ing brown leaf-children as greedily as a miser 
counts his gold. And when he drops a single leaf- 
coin into the coffers of the snow, he seems to groan- 
ingly lean over with the wind and try to pick it up 
again. But precious little help does Brother Wind 
give Miser Oak, for the wind has been whipping at 
his golden leaves the whole gusty winter through. 
But never mind! Cheating the snow and defying 
the wind, the oak must noiselessly yield up its last 
stubborn brown leaf just the same! March will call 
to April and April will call to May, and these three, 
with their warm, irresistible, rising tides of sap, 
will steal along the old oak’s roots and stock and 
branches, pushing off his last dead leaf as sweetly 
as a smile fits into the cheeks of a babe. With his 
new suit of twinkling green, perhaps the oak may 
zealously upbraid himself for clinging to the old 
and outworn, when the new and vital was pleading 
to enter his nature and make all things new. 

Just which of the theologies, or philosophies, or 
sciences, or socialisms, or political economies, the 
oak best symbolizes, you may work out at your leis- 
ure and without excitement or sensation. What the 
Master insists upon is this: God’s greening tide of 
love is running deep and strong across the world. 
When the soul of man is caught within its trans- 
figuring vitality, old leaves of thought and vision 
and custom are pushed off by the new buds of prom- 
ise, that the Tree of Life may drop its fruit into all 
the gardens of the wide world. “And this word, 
Yet once more, signifies the removal of things that 


144 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


are shaken as of things that are made, that the 
things that cannot be shaken may remain.” Both 
earth and heaven sometimes fall into a kind of spir- 
itual lethargy. But God forthwith shakes them out 
of their sleep; for He who neither slumbers nor 
sleeps will have His redemptive way with atoms and 
angels, with matter and man. From everlasting to 
everlasting, God in Christ moves marvelously on, 
sowing the wilderness of space with worlds even 
while He shows the wonders of grace to those work- 
ing with Him in cooperative goodness. 


iil 


Consider, finally, that Christ’s new law contains 
the one universal language of man to man. “By 
this shall all men know that ye are My disciples.” 
The science of language is interesting and compli- 
cated. Comparatively few people use understand- 
ingly any dialect or tongue other than that unto 
which they were born. But love is so comprehend- 
ing, so sympathizing, so understanding throughout 
its moods, tenses, syllables, and sentences that all 
men can catch love’s meaning. Men cannot agree 
in their creeds; it is not good that men should agree 
in their creeds, so many-sided and profoundly com- 
plex is truth. Men cannot agree in their politics, or 
economics, or forms of government; nor, let me re- 
affirm, is it wise that they should, so necessarily 
changeful and imperfect are all these worthful as- 
pects of civilization. There is only one fact spaci- 
ous enough for men to move about in, understand 
each other in, interpret the meaning of life in, and, 


CHRIST’S NEW LAW 145 


through the process, get them characters more dur- 
able and divine than the cosmos. It is the fact of 
love—love that can so speak its own mystic tongue 
that all men may hear and heed its mighty music. 
Let us get a close-up of love’s universality. It 
reaches down into the sub-human. Your dog, your 
horse, your sheep, your bird, denied as yet the maj- 
esty of human speech, can, nevertheless, under- 
stand whether your voice is keyed to tones of love 
or lovelessness. At Heart’s Delight Farm, I 
watched a Mother Robin illustrate the all-compre- 
hending genius of love at work in the universe. It 
was the middle of September, and the first frost had 
just begun to weave its silver tapestries across the 
land. Mother Robin had built her home on the 
strong arm of a noble tree and hatched her young. 
One of her fledglings somehow fell out of that tree- 
apartment, and lay, panting and half-dead, on the 
ground beneath. The Mother could not lift her 
fallen baby back into its cradle, but she did some- 
thing far more wonderful. She did this: Leaving 
the other little robins tucked safely up in their bird- 
fold, she came down, and, expanding her wings and 
adjusting her bosom to her nestless babe, she sat 
there as patient as fate the long day through, going 
away at intervals to get food for the birds above, 
while her chief solicitude was for the little one on 
the ground below. With awe and tears, I watched 
that Mother Bird—watched through the morning 
and afternoon, and when the curtain of darkness 
fell, the Mother was still warming her child with 
her love-taught wings and bosom. Next morning, 
I found the frozen fledgling dead upon the ground, 
10 


1446 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


but for all the mornings yet to be, I shall hear One 
saying: “By this great law of love shall even bird 
and beast act according to the love-veined genius of 
the universe.” 

Yet, of course, it is up in and through the great 
human world that Christ’s new law is to be su- 
premely effective. “The marks of civilization dis- 
close man’s uses of matter. Hence the steamship, 
the railroad, the automobile, the telegraph, the tel- 
ephone, and wireless wizardry. But man’s great 
discovery is yet to'come. It is this: The power of 
love in human relations. When men learn to trust 
and work with the creative power of love, as they 
now trust and work with the constructive power of 
matter, they shall have the one sure guarantee that 
their vast and complicated house named civilization 
shall not be destroyed by the insane forces of hate, 
functioning through Christless mind and turning 
the world into an international graveyard. 

The most hopeful sign of an almost hopeless and 
heart-broken world is the emphasis thoughtful men 
now place upon Christ’s new law for the solution of 
our human and world-problems. President Cool- 
idge, in his inaugural, after stressing the various 
formulae looking toward permanent peace—such as 
the clarification of the principles of international 
law, the outlawing of aggressive war, and relief 
from the economic pressure making for war—adds 
these most searching words: ‘But there is another 
element, more important than all, without which 
there cannot be the slightest hope of a permanent 
peace. That element lies in the heart of humanity. 
Unless the desire for peace be cherished there, un- 


CHRIST’S NEW LAW 147 


less the fundamental and only natural source of 
brotherly love be cultivated to its highest degree, all 
artificial efforts will be in vain. Peace will come 
when there is realization that only under a reign of 
law, based on righteousness and supported by the 
religious conviction of the brotherhood of man, can 
there be any hope of a complete and satisfying life. 
Parchment will fail, the sword will fail, it is only 
the spiritual nature of man that can be triumphant.” 
Have you considered, my friends, that when all 
men are at their best—whether presidents, poets, 
preachers, painters, musicians, journalists, teachers, 
hod-carriers, or politicians—they invariably artic- 
ulate the truth of the Christ? ‘By this shall all men 
know’’—love is so deep and strong and perceptive 
and immeasurable that love alone lends itself to 
man’s universal speech to man. 

Yet, our ending must be with our beginning. 
“God is love.” Therefore, love, reaching down into 
the sub-human and pervading the Christian human, 
overarches the world as the skies overarch lands 
and seas. Hence the climax of all thinking and 
dreaming and doing comes as magnificently as 
morning breaks over the hills of earth. “For I am 
persuaded,” says one who was caught in the clasp 
of Christ’s law of love and lifted to heights super- 
nal and eternal, ‘I am persuaded that neither death, 
nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, 
nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, 
nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to 
separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ 
Jesus our Lord.” 


Vill 


THE IDEALS OF BRITAIN AND 
AMERICA * 


“Tet men say among the nations, The Lord reigneth.” 
—1 Curon. 16: 31. 


P NHIS is an auspicious hour for both Britain 
and America. It is always a salutary thing 
when any two nations reach a better under- 

standing, no matter what their names or geographi- 

cal location. But, at this time in history, the draw- 
ing together of no two nations signifies greater 
good for the world than this deepening fellowship 
of the English-speaking races. Understanding is 
always an excellent thing. Without it, individuals 
and races travel in confusion the road to chaos. If 
we but knew each other better, if we had a more 
illuminating and sympathetic comprehension of each 
other’s aims and ideals, half of our individual, so- 
cial, national, and international questions could be 
satisfactorily answered. As dear, genial Charles 

Lamb knew, it is difficult to dislike people we really 

know. Because of this, we never tire of repeating 

the pleasant story of Lamb and his friend. It seems 
that the essayist, who stuttered in speaking but 

whose writing flows with the spontaneity of a 

mountain brook, was criticising, rather severely, a 


*An address in the First Congregational Church, San Francisco, July 
10, 1924, on the occasion of the visit of the British Fleet to America. 


148 


IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 149 


certain person. ‘‘Why, Charles,” interposed his 
friend, “I didn’t even know that you knew him.” 
“Oh,” said Lamb, “I d-d-o-n’t. I-I- c-c-couldn’t 
d-d-dislike a m-m-man I-I-know.” Likewise, if we 
really come to know each other as individuals and 
nations, it will be increasingly difficult for us to 
hate and destroy that which should be loved and 
protected. To this end, all right-thinking Britons 
and Americans are resolved that nothing shall in- 
terfere with the ever-growing appreciation of these 
two great peoples for each other. In speaking, 
therefore, of the ideals of Britain and America, I 
desire to emphasize our creed and our deed, our 
belief and our conduct. 


I 


What, then, is the creed of Britain and America? 
Is there some common ground, some universal, all- 
inclusive aim and motive that actuates them? 
Without attempting an exhaustive answer, I wish 
to consider that which is at least suggestive and fun- 
damental. 


We believe in ourselves—that is the first article in 
our bi-national creed. Perhaps we believe in our- 
selves too much! Consequently, it is unnecessary 
for us to obey the injunction of the Scotchman who 
said: “TI hae been prayin’ the Lord for forty years 
to gie me a good opinion o’ myself!’ Neverthe- 
less, a wholesomely good opinion of one’s self, both 
personally and nationally speaking, is eminently 
worth while. That was bad theology and worse 
humanity which characterized men as worms of the 


150 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


dust. No such conception has the slightest founda- 
tion in the teachings of our Lord and Saviour. He 
well-nigh exhausts the splendor and power of 
speech in setting forth the essential dignity and 
grandeur of human nature. No worm-of-the-dust 
philosophy can withstand the heavenly power of 
His keen, searching. breath; He blows it everlast- 
ingly back into the dusty death out of which it came. 
Thus, I insist, that it is salutary and invigorating 
for these English-speaking peoples to think well of 
themselves, to believe in themselves, and to do so in 
that spirit of soberness and wisdom which will en- 
able them to discharge the tremendous responsibil- 
ities imposed upon them by duty and destiny. 

We believe, secondly, in the right of every na- 
tion to lead its own life. We have no disposition 
to impose our national habits or peculiarities upon 
other peoples. Advisedly do I say impose. We 
have wrought out, in our varied careers, certain 
great principles of government, certain clearly de- 
fined principles of democracy, which are of uni- 
versal moment to mankind. These values, in time, 
are bound to become nationally contagious; there- 
fore, it is not necessary to impose them. They will 
operate with the power and momentum inherent in 
pervasive and peaceful penetration. Nothing can 
stop them any more than one can stop the shining 
of the sun. You may go into your house, shut the 
doors, fasten down the windows, and draw the 
blinds. For you, all within may be dark, musty, 
and desolate. But God’s golden sunshine is pour- 
ing down upon the earth just the same. It is im- 
partial, universal, life-giving to plants, animals, and 


IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 151 


men, even though you have elected to live in your 
dungeon of death. So, individuals and nations en- 
deavor, sometimes, to shut out the inshining light 
of freedom and humanity. For a time, and to their 
own terrible injury, they may fatally succeed. Yet, 
the sun of liberty and law—the center of the solar 
system of human governments—shines on and on 
with inexhaustible brilliance and power. Sometime 
that kindly light is bound to search out the most 
backward peoples. The privilege and the duty of 
these two puissant nations is to keep the light of 
law and order shining; or, to speak more correctly, 
we must expose our national windows to the sun 
of righteousness and justice. Then the undying 
light will stream in upon us, making our national 
homes all glorious within. 

“Why do we believe in the right of every nation 
to lead its own life ?’’—that is a question deserving 
of the profound answer which may be given to it. 
We believe it, in the first place, because there is such 
an immeasurable value as national individuality. 
Since the dawn of civilization and with the more 
definite unfolding of nations, something distinctive 
has grown up in the life of the various peoples and 
races. ‘Take ancient Egypt, for example. We 
would not willingly exchange our civilization for 
that of those old Egyptians. Nevertheless, we 
should be inexcusably parochial—as many of us in- 
excusably are—if we were dead to some of the 
great things that shone through the lives of the 
Egyptians. What builders they were! How pro- 
foundly they believed in immortality! Think, also, 
of what we owe to the Greeks. Why, they had a 


152 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


genius for beauty. Their power for dreaming of 
loveliness and then, of embodying it in painting and 
sculpture is unparalleled. Some of their artistic 
creations are as lovely as if they had blown the 
breath of angels into bloom. That Greek sense of 
beauty is so distinctive that it will never wear out. 
Rome, also, has made her vast contribution in her 
organizing genius and her conception of law.. This 
same principle holds of modern nations. Russia, 
Italy, Germay, France—all have contributed some- 
thing to the general good. 

As for Britain, her colonizing power is as wide 
as the circle of the suns. If, on the one hand, she 
has given mankind a Shakespeare, a Newton, and a 
Bacon, on the other England has sent her civic and 
commercial genius to the ends of the earth. Mean- 
time, what have we, as Americans, to offer to the 
great family of nations? We have a passion for 
freedom; we believe in the average man; we are 
almost overwhelmingly practical. Our energy is 
the eighth wonder of the world to our neighbors 
bordering the seven seas. 

Now, this distinctive contribution of peoples to 
the general welfare is rooted in one of the great 
laws of the cosmos. Alfred Russel Wallace says 
that infinite variety is the law of the universe. He 
comes to this conclusion after studying the diver- 
sity of life-forms everywhere in evidence. He finds 
this variousness in star and flower and bird and an- 
imal and man. After making his immense survey, 
the scientist turns philosopher. Now and then it is 
a splendid sight, I think, to watch a philosopher 
swallow a scientist. I would not invariably recom- 


IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 153 


mend such a menu for philosophers because, in the 
first place, they might be smitten by the pangs of 
philosophic indigestion; and, furthermore, the sci- 
entist himself might not enjoy the experience. 
Nevertheless, as I say, it is good to see Wallace the 
philosopher eat Wallace the scientist alive. Thus, 
after fetching a vast circle of scientific scrutiny 
round about, Darwin’s co-discoverer of evolution 
asks this question: Why, after all, was the universe 
created? Then follows his answer: “It is that this 
earth, with its infinitude of life and beauty and 
mystery, and the universe in the midst of which we 
are placed, with its overwhelming immensities of 
suns and nebulae, of light and motion, are as they 
are, first, for the development of life culminating in 
man; secondly, as a vast school-house for the 
higher education of the human race in preparation 
for the enduring spiritual life to which it is des- 
tined.” I recommend these words to all super-nat- 
ionalists, isolationists, and atheists! 

We believe, furthermore, in the rights of little 
peoples—what Woodrow Wilson called the right of 
self-determination. Never again, let us pray God 
even as we highly resolve, shall the little, nation- 
ally-weak peoples be bandied about by the so-called 
major nations for selfish ends. It may take certain 
people in all nations a long time to realize it, but the 
era of exploitation and rapine, directed against the 
weak and desolate and forlorn, is doomed, is giving 
place to a time in which that woefully wanting ele- 
ment among nations shall irresistibly assert itself— 
the majesty and quickening power of an internat- 
ional conscience. Where would civilization be to- 


1544 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


day were it not for the stand taken by the little 
peoples during those fateful years beginning with 
1914? If Britain and America ever forget what 
Belgium and Serbia did in a time of awful terror 
and peril, they will be ingrates and traitors to hu- 
manity. When the great breach came, the little 
peoples were the fillers of the breach. When the 
crack of doom sounded, the little peoples were un- 
terrified as they received the iron-heel of that huge 
man-beast from the Rhine, who went forth to 
trample civilization itself into the muck and mire. 
If we forget the little peoples, may our right hands 
forget their cunning, O Britain and America! 

There is another article in our bi-national creed. 
We believe that right makes might; we do not be- 
lieve that might can make right in any world in 
God’s universe. And just because we believe this, 
we are determined upon two things. The first is, 
we can die, if need be, for a great cause. There are 
times when it is far more necessary to die than it is 
to live. These are the times when iniquity and op- 
pression gain a temporary upper hand and threaten 
to hurl civilization back into the dark ages. Then 
does the human soul rise superior to disaster and 
death. There has been such an exhibition of this 
high human mettle on the earth in the last ten years 
that the most heroic ages of the past never witnessed 
its like on such a colossal scale. 

The second thing we are determined on is this: 
We are determined to so organize our international 
life that war, with its waste and terror and desola- 
tion, shall not be practiced by the peoples of the 
earth. This can be done; it must be done; it will 


IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 155 


be done. We have already made a beginning; the 
seed has been planted; the sentiment is spreading. 
One of the healthiest things in the wide world today 
is the growing antipathy to war. If we reverence 
God, if we love men and women and children, if we 
hold dear the priceless treasures of civilization, we 
must do everything within our power—and do it 
now—to prevent another war, big or little, national 
or international. We modern people have grown 
too ingenious in the science of self-destruction to 
give ourselves over to bad temper. Therefore, we 
must, in time of peace and sanity, prepare to pre- 
vent war. God helping us, we can and must do no 
other. 


Il 


If, then, I have roughly sketched our bi-national 
creed, I must now say a word concerning our bi- 
national deed. Our duty—which Robert E. Lee 
characterized as the sublimest word in the language 
—what is that? 

It is our duty, in the first place, to guard our in- 
dependence. In the new world-movement for or- 
ganization against war, the death-enders, last- 
ditchers, and their like, play up the false idea that 
we are about to relinquish our independence as na- 
tions. Nothing could be further from the truth; 
and, moreover, nothing could be less desirable. The 
idea of the Kaiser was that of a government for the 
entire world, in which he himself should be the 
chief mogul. Such a scheme would be to commit 
international suicide by monotony. 

No; neither the League nor the World Court 


156 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


contemplates the yielding of our national sover- 
eignty and independence. Knowing as we do the 
soul of Britain and America, to say nothing of the 
other nations, we know that they are too deeply de- 
voted to the principle of independence to yield it up 
on any account whatsoever. Why, the spirit of in- 
dependence is bred in our bone. Nearly six hun- 
dred years lie between the birth of Magna Charta 
and the Declaration of Independence. But the 
blood of the men of Runnymede flowed in the veins 
of the men who signed the Declaration in Phila- 
delphia. The barons who fought King John were 
the spiritual and patriotic ancestors of the men who 
fought George III. With a great price has our in- 
dependence on both sides of the sea been bought 
and maintained. Not until every drop of blood 
within us has eyes that look downward, will the 
men and women of these two great countries barter 
away their independence, their national autonomy, 
their right to make and enforce laws. Therefore, 
let me repeat: It is our duty to guard our independ- 
ence. 

But there is a second thing we must do. We 
must foster our interdependence. ‘Today, with man- 
kind’s widening vision and larger contacts, I do not 
hesitate to say that the spirit of interdependence is 
just as imperative as the principle of independence. 
I believe, moreover, that the time is coming when 
the only possible means of nations maintaining their 
independence will be through recognition and prac- 
tice of the principle of interdependence. I do not 
get this conclusion, I need hardly say, from the 
average partisan, nationalist, or politician. I get it 


IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 157 


from the nature of things, from the social forces at 
work in the world and the universe; in a word, 
from God Himself. This law of interdependence 
is operative throughout the physical order. Every 
atom has business with other atom; every flower 
blows for every other flower; every star shines for 
every other star. So sensitive is the cosmos, 
thought Victor Hugo, that the fragrance of the 
cornflower troubles the constellation. ‘Nothing in 
the world is single,” sang Shelley. “All things, by 
a law divine, mingle and merge in one another’s be- 
ing.” 

That interdependence which is in nature is man- 
ifesting itself, as never before, in the life of men 
and nations. Woe to the people who dispute the 
imperativeness of this unfolding, God-given law! 

And because of its absoluteness, one of the big 
tasks confronting mankind today is this: We must 
slay our national cave-man. ‘There are individuals 
in every land who understand the necessity of inter- 
dependence among peoples—I mean definite, or- 
ganized cooperation. But when it comes to a na- 
tion—a whole people—doing it, we are made to 
realize, somewhat poignantly, how far we are from 
things as they ought to be and may be. Consider 
this: Every civilized community has its courts of 
law. As misunderstandings arise—and in a world 
such as ours there will always be misunderstandings 
—law-abiding people do not think of taking the law 
into their own hands; they submit their cause to 
judge and jury. But this was not always so. Time 
was when the man with his spear of flint killed his 
neighbor, cooked him, and ate him. But in the 


158 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


long course of the ages that custom was outgrown. 
Of course there are individuals—bandits, swash- 
bucklers, bootleggers, murderers, gamblers, and 
brothel-keepers—who still follow the spirit of the 
cave-man. Yet the vast majority of citizens are 
amenable to courts of law. 

But just here we come upon one of the strangest 
cases of arrested development; it pertains to the 
habits of nations. Every nation ts the judge of its 
own cause. Within the nation we have courts of 
law that the individual may not judge his own case 
and that justice may be done. But until compara- 
tively recent times, each nation has been the sole 
judge of its own cause. Do you not think that it is 
about time we began to consider seriously a method 
for correcting this anomalous situation? Entirely 
aside from the fact that our national self-judgments 
are not necessarily just and correct, such procedure, 
in this tremendously complex modern era, is very 
dangerous. Any national adventurer, responsible to 
nobody but his own nation, may set the world on 
fire overnight. Is it unreasonable to assume that 
such a person or people should be internationally 
arrested and compelled to submit their cause to a 
Court capable of rendering a just judgment; and 
then of having that judgment executed, if neces- 
sary, by a police duly qualified for such an office? 

This practical interdependence amounts to what 
Clutton-Brock has defined as “pooling our national 
self-esteem.” We are constantly doing this as in- 
dividuals—at least the majority of well-bred people 
are. Now and then’ we meet an individual who de- 
lights in everlastingly bragging up his ancestors. 


IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 159 


Unfortunate, indeed, is the person who does not 
have forbears of whom he can gratefully think and 
speak, But some people overdo their ancestral sig- 
nificance. ‘They are liable to forget that it is more 
important to become a first-class descendant than it 
is to have a blue-blooded ancestor. We must reckon 
with the law of heredity, but we must not wreck the 
law of individual responsibility and personal 
achievement. I think that in Heaven we do not get 
nearly as much credit for our ancestors as we do 
for our descendants. At any rate, we feel like 
shunning persons who make a hobby of family 
affairs. They are strangely oblivious of the fact 
that, after all, there are other families and other 
affairs; and the well-bred person gives due empha- 
sis to this truth. 

Why may we not give free play to a similar prac- 
tice among nations? Why may we not learn to pool 
our national self-esteem as well as our individual 
self-esteem? This, as a matter of fact, would prove 
to be one of the supreme creators of good-will 
among' nations. We know that an individual is de- 
veloped through his appreciations rather than 
through his fault-finding capacity. The same is 
true of peoples. As long as a man is bitten by the 
bug of nationalitis he will be blind to the virtues of 
other nations. Neither England nor America nor 
France nor Germany has a monoply of all the nat- 
ional values; humanity is of God; therefore, hu- 
manity is bigger than nationality can possibly be. 
Pooling our national self-esteem simply means that 
while we are to love our respective countries we 
must not forget the Country of Mankind. If we 


160 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


do, the God of Mankind will severely remind us of 
our delinquency in this regard. 

Briefly, I must speak of the third thing pertain- 
ing to our bi-national deed. I know of no way 
whereby we may truly guard our independence and 
foster our interdependence save through our de- 
pendence upon God. The task is too great, the or- 
deal too severe, the problems too overpowering, the 
details too baffllng—in a word, the mightiness of 
the situation can be met only through faith in the 
almightiness and guidance of the living God. 
Statesmanship, said my great, dear friend and pred- 
ecessor, Doctor Frank W. Gunsaulus, consists in 
men finding out which way God is going and then 
in men going that way. If we really believe in our 
Lord Christ, we know at least some of the ways 
God is going. God is going the way of justice; 
therefore, all injustice must be overthrown. God 
is going the way of mercy; therefore, the spirit of 
unmercifulness must be banished. God is going the 
way of hope; therefore, all hopelessness must be 
removed from the human heart. God is going the 
way of love; therefore all hate must be turned out 
of the house of life. God is going the way of 
righteousness and peace; therefore, all war—and 
the causes which make for war—must give way be- 
fore the spirit of goodwill and organized practices 
of mankind. ‘Civilization,’ said Edmund Burke, 
“is a contract between the great dead, the living, 
and the unborn.” But civilization is not enough; 
patriotism is not enough; nationality is not enough; 
science is not enough; sentiment is not enough. 
It is when these are fired by faith in the God and 


IDEALS OF BRITIAN AND AMERICA 161 


Father of our Lord Jesus Christ that men shall be- 
come brothers all the world around; ‘nation shall 
not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they 
learn war any more.” ‘To this end, let us join in 
praying one of the greatest prayers ever written, 
highly resolving as we pray, to translate its truth 
into individual and social life: 


“God of our fathers, known of old, 
Lord of our far-flung battle line, 
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold 
Dominion over palm and pine,— 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget—lest we forget! 


The tumult and the shouting dies; 
The Captains and the Kings depart: 
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, 
An humble and a contrite heart. 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget—lest we forget! 


Far-called, our navies melt away, 

On dune and headland sinks the fire; 
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday 

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! 
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, 
Lest we forget—lest we forget! 


For heathen heart that puts her trust 

In reeking tube and iron shard, 
All valiant dust that builds on dust, 

And guarding, calls not thee to guard, 
For frantic boast and foolish word,— 
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!” 


1i 


IX 


ADVENTURES OF THE CHRISTIAN 
nSOUL, + (iE) 


“Ye are not come to what you can touch...... 
you have come to.” Hesrews 12:18, 22. 


P \HERE are few if any Scriptures that set 





forth, more vividly, the long, hard, and wise 

educational journey of mankind than the 
twelfth chapter of Hebrews. It is a study of what 
we know as the two great dispensations—the Old 
and the New. Considering it, do we not feel the 
difference? One suggests the beginning, the other 
the completion of Christianity. One is external, 
the other is internal. One is legal, the other is spir- 
itual. One is like a vast tree, whose body, branches, 
and leaves are all aflame with dazzling and unap- 
proachable lightnings; the other is like the same 
tree, vast, stately, far-spreading, and lo! its very 
body is alive with tenderness, its every branch is 
vocal with love, and all its leaves are quick with 
twinkling drops of song rained from the heavens of 
melody. 

We are to meditate upon the adventures of the 
Christian soul. Pilgrims of the infinite, our begin- 
nings are far back. We have come, already, a long, 
tortuous, moral and spiritual journey. For is not 
man’s venture from everlasting to everlasting? I 

162 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 163 


sometimes fear we miss the majesty of that ocean- 
deep threnody of a planet called the ninetieth Psalm; 
and we are certain to miss its tremendous inner sig- 
nificance, if we merely read it in the light of the 
psalmist’s vision of God rather than in the light of 
our Lord’s revelation of God. With the ancient 
minstrel we chant the solemn words and grand: 
“Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all gen- 
erations. Before the mountains were brought forth, 
or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, 
even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” 
For hymning the eternity of God, loftier words our 
sweet English tongue does not hold. ‘Thou turn- 
est man to dust, and sayest, Return, ye children of 
men.” 

“Return?” Return whither? According to the 
Psalmist, God says, ‘Return to the dust.” But that 
is not the speech of Christ. He, too, has somewhat 
to say about the great return. And it is a return, 
not to dust, but a return home. “In My Father’s 
house are many rooms.” The walls of that upper 
room have expanded into the spiritual cathedral of 
humanity, and all of its interiors are golden with 
echo-organs pealing forth the deathlessness of the 
human soul! Why, in the light of Jesus, the very 
dust is haunted by God. So, if it were possible for 
man, instead of man’s body, to return to the dust, 
the dust itself would become melodious and sing, 
haunting God with the memory of the children of 
men originally created in His image and likeness. 
As God could not endure a haunted universe, He 
would have to begin all over again, recreating His 
human children of the dust and setting their frail 


164 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


feet once more in the spacious ways of the Lord 
Christ. At any rate, I like Obermann’s challenge to 
the Almighty. “And tf it be true,’ he exclaims, 
“that annihilation awaits us, let us so live that tt 
shall be an unjust fate.” 

We have no right I repeat, to interpret the psalm- 
ist’s words in the light of the psalmist’s vision of 
God. It is neither human enough nor divine enough. 
Therefore, we must leave the ancient man’s dust- 
heap for the eternal man’s home—the House not 
made with hands. And this is what our writer 


in text and context, does for us. “You have 
not come to what you can touch,” he cries. “You 
have Come tomo.) Then he undertakes to give 


us our spiritual bearings. He compels the whole 
universe to take part in his service. We shall do 
well to catch even the faintest outline of his colos- 
sal scheme, shot through with a spiritual grandeur 
that thrills, deepens, heightens, and expands the 
soul it fits into as perfectly as a raindrop fits into 
the bosom of the sea. 


I 


The first step in the adventures of a Christian 
soul is toward the Universal Father. ‘You have 
come to the God of all as judge.’’ Consider these 
words; they are like light—they must be broken 
up, resolved, analyzed, before their wonder and 
beauty can break into the mind. They are so great, 
so magnificent, that we shall never exhaust their 
meaning. “The God of all!’ Why, that will com- 
mand the exercise of human and angelic minds to 
all eternity. “The God of all!’ Do we not need 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 165 


to be seriously bitten by such a comprehensive and 
curative thought? The God of all—what? Well, 
the God of all that was, of all that is, of all that 
shall be. The God of all energies; of all forces; 
of all atoms; of all electrons; of all acids; of all 
gases; of all waves, whether ether, water, or sound; 
of all dynamics, kinetics, and statics; of all gravi- 
tation, impact, stability, and capilarity. The God of 
all stars and suns and constellations; the God of all 
colors and perfumes and melodies; the God of all 
animals and men and angels. 

This, then, is a part of what we have come to— 
even the Creator Who was creating millions of ages 
before there were Bibles or calendars or philoso- 
phies or sciences; the Creator Who is still creating 
and will continue creating—forevermore. But 
there is something far grander here than even the 
idea of a Creator; it is the moral judgeship of God. 
Is not this much loftier? We pass, in this higher 
thinking, from creation to morality. And, surely, 
only the God of all is capable of judging all. We 
sometimes say, in the words of the prophet, “It is 
a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living 


God.” And that is awfully true. But I can think ~ 


of a more fearful thing still. It would be to fall 
out of the hands of a dead God—just to be whipped 
up and down the universe by the wild, blind, un- 
thinking, unloving lashes of Fate. For as long as 
there is a living God, there is hope for individuals 
and society; but a dead God, or a past-tense God, 
—why, the very thought freezes the genial currents 
of human nature and threatens us with an ultimate 
system of chilling cold and impenetratable gloom. 


166 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


So, as there is a living God, it is good to know that 
He is our Judge. I would rather have God as my 
judge for a moment than have all men as my judges 
for a millennium. I think more of true justice 
would flash out of the Divine instant than could be 
eked out of a thousand years of human judgeship. 

But there is something nobler here than Creator or 
Judge. It is Fatherhood—the universal and indi- 
vidual Father of all humans—even “the Father of 
our spirits.” What a disclosure! What a spiritual 
distance men have traveled! Little wonder, when 
our sin and ignorance and prejudice and passion are 
weighed, that we so often pervert this gradually un- 
folding and inexpressibly consoling idea of the all- 
glorious God! Do you remember the Hall of Mir- | 
rors on the Midway in the days of the World’s 
Columbian Exposition? Walking innocently in, 
you were instantly caught within the reflections of 
those concave mirrors. And what tricks they played 
upon you! If you were small, you looked large; if 
you were thin, you looked fat; if you were ugly, 
you looked handsome. In other words, the mirrors 
made you look just like what you didn’t look like! 
Well, it would seem, sometimes, that the good God 
has walked into our human halls of concave mirrors 
also. Endeavoring to reveal Himself to us, God 
has often—owing to our perverting mediums—been 
made to appear the direct opposite of what He eter- 
nally is. The caveman within us has monstrously 
conceived an infinite caveman without us; and tribes 
and peoples, and even some so-called Christians, 
have worshipped a monstrosity instead of “the Fa- 
ther of our spirits.” 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 167 


Yet, I insist, the mistake is not altogether strange 
or inexplicable when we consider the long, long 
journey we have made up the slopes of being and 
measure our capacity for misseeing, misdoing, and 
misunderstanding. ‘Think of the ages that have 
passed, of the superstitions that have come and gone, 
of the tribes and races that have flowered and faded, 
before this glorious Christian concept could root it- 


self in the heart of mankind! Beecher confessed « 


that one of the most significant experiments he ever 
saw was one performed by Professor Tyndall in 
New York. Analyzing a beam of light by the spec- 
trum, the physicist showed all the different elements 
existing in white light. But that was not all Tyn- 
dall did. “At this end of the spectrum,” said he, 
“there is another quality, but it is a quality for which 
we have no sense. It is a fact, but you can neither 
see it, nor smell it, nor taste it, nor feel it, nor hear 
it. It is there, but we have no sense to discover it.” 
“And,” says Beecher, “the scientist demonstrated 
that this other quality was there by certain chemical 
effects. It was an active power, producing certain 
effects at that part of the spectrum, yet the on- 
lookers stood outside of it, simply because they could 
not understand its physical quality. And’—added 
Beecher, with a spiritual genius surpassing even the 
scientific genius of Tyndall—‘‘how many other 
things are there all around about us that exist and 
are necessary in the universe, that we never know 
anything about! So, in the Divine nature, how many 
principles, how many points, how many emotions, 
how many beauties there must be, and we do not 


168 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


discern them simply because we are so lacking and 
deficient in our spiritual organisms.” 

Now, even in view of this first adventure of the 
Christian soul, questions like these are frequently 
asked: Can we believe in the immortality of the 
soul? Can we believe in the Kingdom of Christ? 
Can we believe in the Fatherhood of God? Can we 
believe in the final victory of righteousness? ‘The 
answer to all such questions is: Of course we can! 
We can’t believe in anything else and remain Chris- 
tians. Only—let us be on our guard about details, 
which can be neither proved nor disproved. “When 
shall these things be?’ Some twentieth-century 
people seem to think that question originated with 
them. But we know that it is twenty centuries old, 
and its verbal ancestry may extend still farther back. 
When the question was put to the Master, He said: 
“Tt is not for you to know times or seasons, which 
the Father hath set within His own authority.” In 
other words, it is not imperative that we should 
know. But there is something absolutely impera- 
tive—something upon which the issues of life, 
death, faith, hope, love, peace, joy, and victory are 
absolutely dependent. “But ye,’ says our Lord— 
and He is saying it still—‘‘ye shall receive power, 
when the Holy Spirit is come upon you: and ye 
shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all 
Judeea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of 
thereaqrthy, 

Here, then, is Christ’s corrective of all chart- 
making—-whether past, present, or future; of all 
epoch-scheduling; of all putting non-essentials first; 
of all literalistic-mongering, which is a sure sign of 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 169 


spiritual illiteracy; of all excommunicating tenden- 
cies; of all multiplication of new divisions in the 
Army of God, lest there be so many generals that 
we run short of soldiers, or even so many obtruding 
generals and soldiers that we lose sight of our Eter- 
nal Captain. No; we are to be so full of the Holy 
Spirit, so busy living and witnessing all the time, 
everywhere, unto all peoples and ages, that God, 
through our living and serving and witness-bearing, 
may be enabled to usher in the Kingdom which shall 
cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. We 
have not come to what we can touch; but we have 
come to God—the God of all as Creator and Judge 
of all, the Father of our spirits! 


II 


The second step brings us to the Mediator of the 
New Covenant. “You have come to Jesus Who 
meditates the new covenant, and to the sprinkled 
blood whose message is nobler than Abel’s.” Re- 
trace your thought-movement for a moment. It 
says you have come to the Universal Father. But 
how did you arrive? Here is your answer, match- 
less and golden. Come away from Sinai; come 
away from flames of fire and mist and gloom and 
stormy blasts and the blare of a trumpet and a voice 
whose words made men stand terrified and aghast. 
Come away to Calvary! Behold the new covenant, 
written in agonies of mercy and tears of blood! 
There you may see Christian Fatherhood, in the 
vast ways of redemption, in its threefold aspect and 
movement. 

There is, first, the Great High Priest in His min- 


170 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


istry of intercession. “Father, forgive them; for 
they know not what they do.” Love older than the 
stars! Love that has journeyed past the Milky Way 
is now stretched upon the Cross! The nails and 
blood have met within the quivering fires of pain, 
within the heartbreak of God Himself. Yet, sin 
and shame and suffering are impotent to destroy the 
music of Fatherhood that keeps playing up from 
the depths of being and finds expression through 
those love-tuned lips. Yea, as the course, callous 
soldiers send their spikes cutting through tendon 
and muscle and nerve, the High Priest, upon His 
altar of sacrifice, finds opportunity to pray for the 
unprayed-for, even apologizing for the ignorance 
of His murderers. 

Look again, and behold the kind of Fatherhood 
here exposed. “To-day shalt thou be with Me in 
Paradise.” Our High Priest not only prays for the 
ignorant law-enforcers, but He opens the Garden 
of God to penitential lawlessness, granting pardon 
and hope to an unpardoned and hopeless bandit. 
Here is Fatherhood that would fain stretch itself to 
the utmost, stoop itself to the lowest, and thereby— 
oh, wonder of wonders !—exalt itself to the heights 
beyond which heights there are none! 

Look again at this High Priestly Fatherhood, 
and you will see love’s inflowing tide—love return- 
ing upon its own unfathomable tenderness. Love 
must not only love the law-abiding and the lawless- 
ness; Love loves its own with incomparable love- 
liness. “Woman, behold thy son,...... behold thy 
mother.” Thus far, love has been out in the wild, 
terrible places agonizingly feeling its way through 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 171 


No Man’s Land of sin and hell—looking for mor- 
tals whom love and life and law have seemingly 
passed by. But now, love is caressing its own. 
Love is whispering and singing by its own fireside. 
Love is talking back to the woman-motherhood of 
the race, to the sons of all the mothers of men. 

Second: There is the movement of the Sin-Bear- 
ing Sufferer. Already love has been terribly tested, 
Fatherhood has been severely strained. But there 
are more terrible things to come out of the envelop- 
ing midnight of sin and wrestle with love for the 
mastery. ‘‘My God, My God, why hast Thou for- 
saken Me?” Has sin at last dethroned God? The 
worlds are whirling through darkness; devils are 
driving fast and furious; mind is dizzy while mat- 
ter seems to shout over the triumph of doom. 
Hours of silence and darkness go bleeding by, while 
Heaven apparently hides its face and leaves the Son 
of God to tread the winepress alone. Here, verily, 
is the blackest moment in the history of mind and 
soul! 

We shall never know—in time or eternity—all 
that took place in that immeasurable hour. We be- 
lieve that the Lord of Glory went mysteriously out 
into the waste places of sin, tasting the bitter drops 
of the second death that men might be recovered 
from both the second death and the first. Whatever 
it was, whatever the experience of the Saviour in 
that dread time, it appears, almost, to have been the 
place either forgotten by God or well-nigh unknown 
to Him. 

Yet, paradoxical as it may seem, I think that the 
Father-God was never so near His well-beloved Son 


172 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


as in that dire hour of sin-bearing. There is no 
bridge over which mortals can pass to these things 
understandingly. Realizing this, the early Chris- 
tians, in their litanies, prayed: “By Thy sufferings 
known and unknown, Good Lord, deliver us.” 
After returning from No Man’s Land in the spir- 
itual world, Jesus said: “I thirst.” For six eternal 
hours our Lord had hung there amid the jeers and 
the bloody rain and the fiery doom. No wonder 
that excruciating thirst was eating, like molten 
flame, through every portion of His body. Refus- 
ing the drugged wine which was given to malefac- 
tors, He accepted the undrugged potion, thus dis- 
allowing narcotics to deaden the cup of pain He 
drank to the last bitter drop. As in the Garden, so 
upon the Cross, the Saviour is still saying: “The 
cup which the Father hath given Me, shall I not 
drink it?” 

The third movement discloses the triumphant 
Saviour of the world. Completion is the first note 
in the oratorio of redemption. “It is finished.” 
Finished—the House of Salvation, begun before 
the foundations of the world were laid in atomic 
galaxies! Finished—the Music of Prophecy, begun 
thousands of years before the angels sang above 
Bethlehem! Finished—the Activity of Consecrated 
Will, written in the volume of the book whose pages 
had held the gaze of heavenly intelligences the ages 
long and the worlds through! Finished—the 
Vicarious Sacrifice—full, perfect, absolute—born in 
the emotions of the Godhead, Who so loved that He 
was constrained to give nothing less than Himself 
—even His only Begotten Son! Finished—the 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 173 


Celestial Bell of the Atonement, various with many 
tones and thrilling with many variations, but pro- 
foundly melodious with the one fact—God is Love, 
Love is God, and God and Love everlastingly feel 
and find their way to ultimate victory. 

The second note in the oratorio of redemption is 
rest. “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spir- 
it.” The siege has been terrible; the winds of sin 
and death have blown bleak and black; the Cup has 
been mixed with poisoned fire; the waste places of 
being have been lone and horrible. But now, O 
Father, Thy Son is Home again! Henceforth all 
men may be at Home! Throughout the unfolding 
universe the lilies of peace shall ever unfold, and 
even the thorns of sin shall be made to bloom with 
the roses of grace. For have we not come to Jesus, 
the Mediator of the new covenant? Therefore, we 
are no longer pursued by tongued vengeance from 
the ground—Abel’s blood pleading, at best, in tones 
of mingled justice and hate. No! We have come 
to the sprinkled blood—the Life of God that stains 
the worlds even as it feeds angels and men—whose 
message is nobler than Abel’s! And oh, how new, 
how wondrous new! New as the twitter of April 
birds; new as drops of dew on the breast of dawn; 
new as the giving and receiving of forgiveness. 
And yet not too new! New not so much in calendar 
measurements as in heavenly quality. New not so 
much in recentness as in superiority. In a word, 
new as the morning, but as old as the Maker of the 
morning. New as the rose, but as old as the Fash- 
ioner of the rose. New as the Spring, but as old 
as the Creator of all Springs. New as love, but as 


174 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


old as Love’s Original. Thus, in coming to the 
Mediator of the new covenant, we have come to 
That which sets man’s spiritual feet in the highways 
leading to Finality; for the revelation of the Fa- 
therhood of God in Christ is a millionfold more 
wonderful than the creation of the physical uni- 
verse. 


iil 


Another step in our adventure brings us to the 
Spiritual City. ‘‘We have come to Mount Zion, the 
city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.” 
Properly defined, man is a pilgrim to the City of 
the Ideal. The ideal city is graven on the heart of 
humanity because it is originally in the Heart of 
God. ‘The history of civilization,” says the scholar, 
“is the history of cities. Babylon, Nineveh, Jerusa- 
lem, Athens, Rome, Alexandria, Venice, Florence, 
and the medieval cities, all mark stages in the 
higher development of the race.” Now, we are 
keenly aware that our modern cities constitute one 
of the gigantic problems of the world. Bryce, in 
his study, Modern Democracies, proves this propo- 
sition, if any person requires proof of the obvious. 
Thoughtful people know that nothing short of the 
reality of the Christian religion can save our mod- 
ern cities from themselves and so make them con- 
tribute to the city of the living God. 

Nevertheless, the spiritual city is coming, and we, 
by faith and hope, are already come to the heavenly 
Jerusalem. Consider, for a moment, the evolution 
of the spiritual city, confining our survey within 
Judaism and Christianity, though these do not ex- 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 175 


haust the content of the idea. Our God is the God 
of the whole earth, the entire universe, and He is 
just as busy in any one part as in any other part. 
God is toiling on what we call the backward races 
just as wisely, lovingly, and unceasingly as He is 
toiling with the so-called forward races. Find a 
square inch of space where God is not at work this 
moment, and you may prove that Nature loves a 
vacuum! 

Our first glimpse of the spiritual city is back, 
away back. Its proportions are not outwardly com- 
manding, but it is big with creative promises and 
meaningful prophecies. Its invisible foundations 
are laid down on good human dirt, all astir with 
mystic whispers and foregleams divine. God plants 
a kind of city dream-seed in the soil named Abra- 
ham. After awhile the seed gives birth to that 
divine-human child called Faith. And is not Faith 
a majestic architect? Yea, verily! Set Faith down 
anywhere—in desert, garden, mountain, city, or sea 
—and Faith will at once begin to build. Out of its 
own inalienable rights and intrinsic genius of being, 
Faith is a shaper, a weaver, a fashioner, drawing 
materials out of the unseen and compelling them 
into things that are. So the Architect of Faith 
builds Abraham, and Abraham begins to build the 
City of God. “By faith Abraham, when he was 
called, obeyed to go out unto a place which he was 
to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not 
knowing whither he went.” ‘When he was called.” 
When was that? I don’t know exactly; but I think, 
from the start he got and the journey he made, 
Abraham must have been called somewhere back in 


176 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


Eternity! “Abraham obeyed to go out unto a 
place.” What place? Why, the Land of Promise, 
of course! Faith always deals in lands of promise; 
and the best lands of promise, according to Faith, 
are not on the map at all. But remark, also, Abra- 
ham went out, not knowing whither he went! Well, 
then, how did he arrive, if he didn’t know where he 
was going? Perfectly simple! Faith already 
knows the way, because Faith was before ways be- 
came. And how did Abraham behave when he 
reached the land of promise, dwelling in tents with 
Isaac and Jacob? Just as Faith always behaves! 
Faith looks around and out and up for what can- 
not be seen. So, at last, we catch Abraham in one 
of his supreme moods. “For he looked for the city 
which hath the foundations, whose builder and 
maker is God.” 

Did I not say, Set Faith down anywhere, and it 
will begin to build? Thus, Faith builds Abraham, 
makes him a spiritual architect, and lo! we see him 
standing on tip-toe, looking over the tops of things, 
until his vision finally gets under and rests upon the 
city of the living God! ‘When all is said and 
done,” says Emerson, “the rapt saint is found to be 
the only logician.” And is not this logician hid- 
den away in the soul of each of us? We may bury 
him beneath the debris and dust of things; but he 
refuses to die, sweetly tormenting us through the 
very visions he gives us of the men and women we 
might have been. Is it not in such moods as these 
that we catch sweet strains floating through the win- 
dows and walls and gates of our own spiritual city? 
The Something within us answers to the Something 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 177 


without us—and are not these two Somethings the 
Soul of the One Reality? Arnold’s noble lines, 
“Morality,” chant this truth, it seems to me, with a 
simplicity worthy of its grandeur. We cannot al- 
ways kindle the fire divine, says the poet. The spirit 
bloweth and is still, for the soul abides in mystery. 
Nevertheless, we have our golden hours of insight, 
and the tasks we then behold can be fulfilled through 
hours of gloom. With aching hands and bleeding 
feet we dig and heap and build, bearing the burden 
and heat of the day, and wish ’twere done. With 
the returning light, however, we discern what we 
have done through hours of gloom and discourage- 
ment. Then, when the clouds are off the soul and 
we are basking in the eye of Nature, we ask her how 
she viewed our fidelity and struggle and “tasked 
morality.” And Nature, whose answer we dreaded, 
whose eye we could not look into, has a glow upon 
her face and a strong emotion on her cheek: 


“Ah, child,” she cries, “that strife divine, 
Whence was it, for it is not mine? 


“There is no effort on my brow— 
I do not strive, I do not weep; 
I rush with the swift spheres and glow 
In joy, and when I will, I sleep. 
Yet that severe, that earnest air 
I saw, I felt it once—but where? 


“TI, knew not yet the gauge of time, 
Nor wore the manacles of space; 
I felt it in some other clime, 
I saw it in some other place. 
*T was when the heavenly house I trod, 
And lay upon the breast of God.” 


Aye, that is it—‘“‘the Breast of God!’ “We have 
come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the 


heavenly Jerusalem.” 
12 


Xx 


ADVENTURES OF THE CHRISTIAN 
SOUL (II) 


“You have not come to what you can touch...... 
you have come to.’’ Hesrews 12:18, 22. 


I 
A FOURTH step in the adventures of the Chris- 


tian soul brings us to angelic beings. “You 

are come to myriads of angels in festal gath- 
ering.” The fact that angels do not attract the ma- 
jority of people is no reflection whatever upon the 
angels. There are two creatures yonder in the 
pond—a crawfish crawling in the mud at the bot- 
tom, a swan swimming over the silver surface. But 
because the crawfish does not see or appreciate the 
swan’s grace and beauty—what logic or philosophy 
has taught us to conclude that that is the slightest 
reflection upon the swan? 

Without pausing to apply my illustration, angel- 
ology is a very old theme. It figures largely in the 
thought of the Persians and Hebrews, to say noth- 
ing of other peoples. The Bible, of course, makes 
much of angels. Sometimes they are represented as 
a mighty host or army; sometimes as composing 
the court of the King of Eternity; sometimes they 
form a choir as at the Advent. They are also called 
the sons of God, owing their existence, says Godet, 

178 





THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 179 


not to the ordinary processes of filiation, but to an 
immediate act of creation. We know, furthermore, 
that angels are free from sensuous feelings; that 
their knowledge is vast, and yet limited; that they 
are intensely interested in the salvation of human 
beings. 

These are only a few of the representations of 
angels we have in the Hebrew and Christian Scrip- 
tures. ‘‘But,” you say, “I don’t believe in angels.” 
Very well! Still, let me repeat, that that is no dis- 
credit whatever to the angels. ‘Moreover,’ you 
also protest, “the modern mind does not believe in 
angels.” Again I say, Very well! Meantime, may 
I ask this question: Is the modern mind, including 
your own, absolutely final in this matter? Perhaps 
our generation, by its bent and training, is more 
capable of appraising animals than angels; but that 
is no reason why, in a universe with such teeming 
manifoldness of life, the subject of angels should go 
into the discard. Jesus believed in angels, and never 
has mind, in any realm of thought whatsoever, func- 
tioned with even the approximate authority of the 
Lord Christ in matters spiritual and eternal. Once 
the Sadducees presented this proposition to Jesus: 
There were seven brothers who married, in succes- 
sion, one woman. ‘Then the woman died. And 
they wanted to know to which of the seven brothers 
she would belong in the resurrection? Thus did 
the materialists of their day undertake to drive the 
Master into a logical and spiritual cul-de-sac. But 
with the calm of the sea and the flash of the light- 
ning, Jesus answered them: “You are wrong for 
two reasons: First, you do not understand the 


180 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


Scriptures—even your own Scriptures; and, sec- 
ond, you do not understand the power of God.” 

So, when you speak of the modern mind repre- 
sented, it may be, by Wells and Shaw and Bennett, 
disbelieving in angels, here is your twofold reply. 
It does not understand the Scriptures—both the 
written and the unwritten Word. As to the written 
Word, it is the simple truth to say that the Bible 1s 
the highest and noblest expression of the revelation 
of God in the literature of mankind. But, accord- 
ing to this very Bible of ours, God has never left 
Himself without witness at any time or among any 
people. Consequently, every civilized tribe and peo- 
ple have their own particular Scriptures. We think 
that ours are so superior to theirs that they are en- 
titled to this larger light and that it is our duty and 
privilege to acquaint them with the revelation con- 
tained in our Bible. 

Yet, according to Jesus, there is more—infinitely 
more—than the written Word. There is “the 
power of God.” What immense facts and truths 
are here! You do not believe in the resurrection or 
angels, O Sadducees, because you do not under- 
stand the power of God. It is the Power that makes 
no two snowflakes alike; that splits a drop of rain 
on the mountain-top, sending half to the Pacific 
Ocean and half to the Atlantic; that constructs a 
universe out of invisible foundation-stones named 
atoms and forever moves the whole upon electronic 
wheels; that hides a bluebird in an egg, a sequoia 
ina seed, and a human ina germ. Failing to under- 
stand the power of God, your spiritual roof is as 
low as yonder lowering sky. Stretch your true 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 181 


selves out and up! Push in your smothering roof 
and angels will sing and shine through! 

Yes, in the goodness of God, we have journeyed 
up from atoms to angels—‘‘myriads of angels in 
festal gathering.” Why, this whole subject demon- 
strates the relativity of mind; and I mean mind 
from its lowliest embodiment up to its loftiest at- 
tainment. As a country lad, I used to watch the 
tadpoles in a pond. One day I said to a certain an- 
cestor of the frog: “Up here where I live are lovely 
flowers and gorgeous birds and wonderful human 
beings.” But Taddy leaped away in disgust, leav- 
ing behind the faintest suggestion of a croak; that’s 
how I learned, by the way, that tadpoles are the fore- 
runners of all human croakers! But I translated that 
croak, and this is how it reads: “Go on your way, 
foolish boy. I don’t believe in flowers or birds or 
humans; I believe in mud and scum and tadpoles 
only; they are my universe—the only universe there 
is— and I refuse to believe in any other.” 

Many an autumn have I interviewed the caterpil- 
lars. ‘These miraculous worms dress themselves up 
in rainbow colors just to show the dust they creep 
through how beautiful that same dust, when organ- 
ized into golden worms, may become. I said to Mr. 
Caterpillar: “Where are you going?” ‘Please 
don’t bother me, Preacher-man,” he protested. “I’m 
going just as fast as I can to get my wings.” 
“Wings?” I replied, with a scoff. ‘How dare you 
to speak of wings in my presence, you poor little 
worm of the dust!” SoI was getting up a fine pres- 
sure of indignation, when the caterpillar rejoined: 
“Just now, you'd better go on studying your old dry 


182 . THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


sermen; I see you’re in no mood to listen to a real 
sermon. If you were a merchant, you would, like 
many other preachers, be forced to announce your 
wares as ‘Dry Goods and Notions.’ But just come 
around next summer, and I will show you my 
wings.” Did not the worm have the better of the 
argument? For when I call upon the many-colored 
citizens of God’s amazing out-of-doors next June- 
time, I shall probably see that worm of the dust rid- 
ing on gorgeous wings down the morning-ways of 
summer. 

Now, suppose we leave tadpoles and caterpillars 
for a moment and visit an Australian bushman— 
the nearest living human relation we have, perhaps, 
to our far-away and long-ago ancestors. There is 
nothing singular, by the way, in the fact that some 
of our friends and fellow-workers, deny our phy- 
sical descent from and kinship to the lower orders. 
Man is universally supersensitive on the matter of 
ancestral pride. Do we not boast of royal blood 
and Pilgrim blood and blue blood? Some of us 
came out of huts, but this fact is not unduly stressed 
in our social rosters. In the case of great men, like 
Lincoln, we point with pride to the log cabin. But 
the majority of us are not great; therefore, we ig- 
nore even the comfortable home and godly parents 
and Christian friends and neighbors from whom we 
sprang. Why? Well, gold and fame and pride and 
position blind us to truth. So we buy pictures of 
fictitious ancestors and hang them in our halls. Did 
you know that there are picture-merchants in Amer- 
ica who will sell you a noble ancestor for so much 
cash? Yes-siree! What I am saying is this: Most 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 183 


of us are ridiculously sensitive as to what we came 
from and tragically supine as to what we have come 
to and whither we are going. 

But to return to my illustration. Suppose I said 
to the bushman: “In the land where I live, we have 
horseless wagons—automobiles that run by their 
own power.” But the bushman who never saw an 
automobile, would shake his head and say: ‘“Im- 
possible!’ “But that is not all we have in America. 
We fly through the air like a bird; then, descending 
in the same machine, we swim through the water 
like a fish.” By this time the bushman’s incredulity 
would beget indignation. Still, fully aware of the 
danger of indignant ignorance, I add: “We do 
something else in America. We talk through space 
without any wires. In Central Church, for example, 
I speak to multitudes every Sunday whom I cannot 
see; and, most remarkable of all, the man a thou- 
sand miles away hears my voice before the man who 
is only ten feet away.” ‘That, of course, would be 
the limit. The bushman would explode with wrath 
and say: “Look here, American man, ideas natur- 
ally make me sleepy, but insults to my intelligence 
make me angry. Inasmuch as I am hungry already, 
I will just order you cooked up and served for din- 
ney 

But what has all this to do with angels? Very 
much. The modern mind, relatively speaking, is, at 
its best, a kind of Australian bushman wandering 
about in our wilderness-wonder of a _ universe. 
Knowing electrostatics, it does not know “the power 
of God.” Knowing chemistry, it does not know 
“the power of God.” Knowing physics, it does not 


184 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


know “the power of God.” Knowing wireless 
waves, it does not know “the power of God.” 
Knowing atoms, it does not know angels. Like the 
tadpole and the bushman, the modern mind says 
there are no such creatures. 

Now, I believe in angels because angels sound a 
higher note in the music of personality than it is 
possible for human personality to sound. The unt- 
verse, according to all competent thinkers, is the 
result of the Cause named Infinite Personality. The 
three phases of personality within the worlds are— 
the illimitable, the angelic, and the human. For 
aught we know, there may be personality in the sub- 
human world. Some of our under-relations, such 
as dogs and horses, have so much more nobility and 
good manners than some humans have, that, if in 
the march of the All-glorious God through His sys- 
tems, the flash of personality should bite into our 
lesser non-human friends, would it not be entirely 
worthy of the grace of God in Christ? 

Why, a universe without angels is as impossible 
as world without spring. An angel is as plausible 
asanatom. The undying miracle is this: That any- 
thing at all is or can be. You do not have to ex- 
plore the nature of angels to be driven in upon meta- 
physics; a germ, a stick, or a stone will serve as 
well. In the last analysis, everything is wonder- 
fully miraculous; everything—from atom to angel, 
from dirt to duty, is big with the bewildering beauty 
of the Divine. In the poem, one says to God: 
“Eider Father, in Whose shining eyes hoary secrets 
are hidden, canst Thou tell what is in the heart of a 
cowslip blossom?” “Yea,” saith God, “smaller than 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 185 


all lives that be, secret as the deeps of ocean, a little 
house of seeds, like an elfin granary, stands within 
the cowslip blossom.” “But tell me, Eider Brother, 
skilled in Nature’s creeds and crafts, speller of the 
weeds and stones, O tell me what is in the heart of 
the smallest of the seeds?” “God Almighty’”—an- 
swers the Voice Divine—“God Almighty is within 
the smallest of the seeds, and with Him cherubim 
and seraphim, filling all Eternity, Adonai Elohim!” 


I] 


A further adventure brings us to the Christian 
Church. “You have come to the general assembly 
and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in 
Heaven.” Here is one of the most august concep- 
tions of the Church we have anywhere in the Bible 
or out of it. It includes the whole Commonwealth 
of God, the old dispensation and the new. What a 
world of suggestiveness flashes from these words— 
Church of the Firstborn! The firstborn of every 
Jewish family was peculiarly sacred to God. Israel 
itsel{i—the people and nation likewise—has a singu- 
lar significance. But, supremely, the conception is 
fulfilled in Christ, Who is called “the firstborn of 
all creation, the firstborn from the dead.” 

Now, in speaking of the Christian Church, we 
sometimes distinguish by saying the church mili- 
tant and the church triumphant; for, in so far as 
this world and present conditions are concerned, we 
know that, only figuratively speaking, is there any 
such thing as the Christian Church. We have 
scores of sects, many of which claim, of course, to 
be the true and only Christian Church. Neverthe- 


186 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


less, we know that, properly speaking, they are all 
merely major and minor sects of the Universal 
Church of Christ. I have in mind the Roman Cath- 
olic Church, the Greek Catholic Church, the Church 
of England, the American Episcopal Church, the 
Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Episcopal 
Church, the Congregational Church, the Unitarian 
Church, the Baptist Church, the Lutheran Church, 
and all the others. Yet notwithstanding the obvious 
imperfections of our warring and ofttimes un- 
Christian sects, we would not forego the grandeur 
of the truth embodied in the idea of the Christian 
Church to which, by the grace of Christ, we have 
already come through faith and hope and love. 
The Church on earth is so imperfect because it is 
composed of imperfect human beings. And this— 
is it not?—is one of the major reasons for the 
Christian Church being in the world at all. If we 
were all thoroughly Christianized, fullgrown, and 
spiritually perfect, what, pray, would be the need 
of the Church? 

Thus, what we have in actuality, here and now 
in the world, is this: Many different sects holding, 
however imperfectly, the heavenly ideal of the 
Church. And what we must learn to do is more 
and more to emphasize the ideal and minimize the 
unideal. This has been done, it is being done, and 
it will continue to be done. Our various sects, to be 
sure, are frequently narrow and provincial. Their 
counterpart is quite adequately seen in those super- 
patriots, roaring through many of our political par- 
ties—narrow and provincial Americans, poisoned 
by partisanship, who are pathetically unaware of 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 187 


the importance of other nations in the progress and 
work of mankind. But the Church, which is cath- 
olic and universal, at once in Heaven and upon the 
earth, is large enough to make room for every temp- 
erament, every type, every degree of ignorance, 
learning, and spiritual attainment possible to men. 
Some sincere and honest souls disagree with this 
proposition. Nevertheless, I maintain that the 
Christian Church, in the conception of its Founder, 
is big enough and capacious enough to include all 
morally and spiritually aspiring souls. 

Let me illustrate. There are some good friends 
who would oust some of us because we believe in 
the philosophy of evolution. We believe in the 
same God and Father; we love and adore the same 
Saviour; some of us believe in the Virgin Birth of 
our Lord, as I most emphatically do, and find within 
it the most beautiful and holy example of the move- 
ment of the Godhead in His vast unfolding and 
evolving processes, yielding us the cosmic and eter- 
nal Christ in terms of flesh and blood; the One and 
Only Saviour of the World; Who was before all 
things, and will continue to be, after all things have 
returned into those eternal thinkings out of which 
they came. 

Well, then, we all believe in the same God, the 
same Christ, and the same Bible, what is all this 
trouble about? It is just a difference in interpreta- 
tion of the one Reality—the God and Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. Some of my friends believe that 
the Bible teaches how God created the universe. I 
believe that the Bible does a much more important 
thing: It gives us an utterably glorious God, and 


188 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


permits us to find out, if we can, how God created 
in the beginning and is still creating to-day. So, 
evolution is not God, does not and cannot take the 
place of God, but is just an endeavor to account for 
the way in which God does things. 

Yet, it is said that some of us have no right to the 
name of Christian, or to be members of the Chris- 
tian Church, because we hold this philosophy. It 
seems to me, that something more than words and 
ideas are at stake. It is the attitude, the atmosphere, 
the spirit; in a word, it is Christian love—the most 
terrible, the most difficult, the most glorious, the 
most destiny-fraught fact in a universe of moral be- 
ings. Do you think that I would put good people 
such as I have just described out of the Church? 
Why, the thought is absurd! If they are Chris- 
tians—that is, if they have the Spirit of Christ— 
they belong to the true Church. You canot put a 
Christian out of his own Christ-built home; the 
most you can do is to put him out of one of our in- 
numerable sects. My argument is: The Christian 
Church is capacious enough to include even those 
we exclude, if the excluded have the Spirit of the 
Master, the final token of membership in the Church, 
whether on earth or in Heaven. 

Now, take another illustration—My friend, Dr. 
John Haynes Holmes. He is a thinker, a scholar, 
and an orator. Mentally brilliant, morally upright, 
militantly reformatory, does not Holmes, like each 
of us, have his blind spot? What I mean is this: 
He lacks what I may venture to call the faculty of 
discriminating final values in the realm of personal- 
ity. For example, he seems to think that Jesus and 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 189 


Gandhi, the great Indian mystic and reformer, are 
upon the same level. Now this, I maintain, is a 
serious defect in spiritual vision, incapacity to wor- 
thily evaluate in the realm of personality. Anybody 
who fails to see the difference between Christ and 
any other person, living or dead, is, in the last analy- 
sis, tremendously unjust to himself. Suppose I go 
over to the Art Institute and find a Turner and a 
newspaper cartoon hanging side by side. If I were 
to say that both represent the same values in the 
world of art, you would say that my capacity for 
judging art is not of the highest. Yet the difference 
between Jesus and any other person is vastly greater 
than the difference between the finest Turner and 
the most commonplace cartoon. 

Suppose, again, that we had Caruso back in the 
flesh, right here upon this platform, singing in those 
golden tones no other mortal seems to have had. 
After he had finished, suppose we were to listen to a 
good, even an unusual singer. Then, having lis- 
tened to both, what if I were to say that there was 
no difference in the music they produced? You 
would quite properly reply that I, at least, am not 
a qualified judge in vocal music. Yet the difference 
between Jesus and any other person whatsoever is 
infinitely greater than the difference between Caruso 
and other singers. But notwithstanding what I re- 
gard as a blind spot in Doctor Holmes, do you think 
I would expel him from the Christian Church? 
Again, the thing is absurd. At most, I could only 
expel him from a sect; for, if he has the Spirit of 
Christ, his soul-adventure has already made him a 
member of the Christian Church. 


199 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


“But hold on!” some one protests. “Answer me 
this question: As Dr. Haynes Holmes does not be- 
lieve in the deity of Christ, how could he be a Chris- 
tian and a member of the true Church?” Well, 
now, I am sincerely glad that you have asked that 
question. I confess that it is perfectly legitimate; 
I believe, also, that I have a great answer for you. 
But let me say, before answering, that, personally 
and individually, I could not be the kind of Chris- 
tian I desire to be without a firm belief in the deity 
of our Lord. Nevertheless, the question is authora- 
tively answered—but not in terms of modernism or 
fundamentalism—by our Lord Himself: 

“Then shall the King say unto them on His right 
hand, Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the 
kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of 
the world: for I was hungry, and ye gave Me to 
eat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink; I was a 
stranger, and ye took Mein; naked, and ye clothed 
Me; I was sick, and ye wsited Me; I was in prison, 
and ye came unto Me. Then shall the righteous an- 
swer Him, saying, Lord, when saw we Thee hungry, 
and fed Thee? or athirst, and gave Thee drink? 
And when saw we Thee a stranger, and took Thee 
in? or naked, and clothed Thee? And when saw 
we Thee sick, or in prison, and came unto Thee? 
And the King shall answer and say unto them, 
Verily, I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto 
one of these My brethren, even these least, ye did it 
unto Me.” 

In that day I would rather be one of Christ’s 
right-handers than to be able to recite all the creeds 
of Christendom. Mark this: The blessed of the 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL . 191 


Father—Christ’s right-handers—are among the 
most surprised people in the far-flung universe. 
While upon the earth, they seem never to have seen 
or known the Christ. But listen—and this is the 
profoundly, important fact in the end of things: 
The Eternal Christ knew them! ‘The final question, 
my friends, the destiny-question, is: Not—do I 
know Christ? but—Does Christ know me? 

O brothers, let us get up into the high mountain- 
tops of God! We have got to be Christian lovers 
sometime; let’s begin now! We are already being 
enfolded in the clasp of Heaven’s new law and 
standard for mankind. “A new commandment give 
I unto you, that ye love one another even as I have 
loved you. By this’—not by anything else, finally, 
on earth or in Heaven—“shall all men know that 
ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.” 

So, we have come at last, falteringly, imperfectly, 
with tears and agony and blood, to the Jerusalem 
which is above, the Mother of us all. Yes, the 
Mother of us all! I like to think of the Christian 
Church in terms of a mother-hen I saw last Sum- 
mer. She had twelve or fourteen chickens—so 
many, indeed, that I was tempted to think for a mo- 
ment that she had adopted another hen’s feathered 
orphans. A storm had broken, the thunders were 
rolling, the lightnings were flashing, and the rain 
was falling. That mother-hen had gathered all her 
chickens under her wings in a green plot of grass 
and flowers. And while the mother furnished them 
a roof from the storm, some of those little creatures 
were thrusting their heads out from under her 
wings and bosom, eating seeds and insects as vora- 


192 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


ciously as June robins eat worms at the early-worm- 
restaurants in Jackson Park. 

And is not the Christian Church our Mother? 
She is great-minded and great-hearted enough to 
stretch her protecting wings over us and hold us 
close to her mothering-bosom. I noticed, moreover, 
that the mother-hen did not dislike her chicks be- 
cause they were of various colors. Some wore little 
feathered dresses of brown and gold; some wore 
light yellow frocks; some had on black velvet 
skirts; a few, being more gaudily disposed than the 
others, had put on dresses of many colors—black 
and white and brown. But inasmuch as they were 
all chickens, the mother seemed to be proud and 
happy. We, too, my brothers and sisters, are folk 
of many colors of ancestry, temperament, disposi- 
tion, training, mentality, and religious inclination. 
But that is no reason why the great Christian 
Church—the Mother of us all—cannot find room 
for us within the beatings of her most glorious and 
sacrificial heart. 


Ii 


The final adventure of the Christian soul brings 
us to the perfected human society. ‘You have come 
to the spirits of just men made perfect.” I think 
these are truly great and wonderful words. Like 
everything noble and beautiful and divine, they lend 
themselves to various degrees of emphasis and mean- 
ing. Consider, first, that they were just men. And 
who are they? ‘To mention but a few, there is 
Moses the murderer, and David the adulterer, and 
John the fire-eater, and Peter the denier, and Paul 


THE CHRISTIAN SOUL 193 


the persecutor. Yes, and there are others. There 
are Augustine the libertine, and Dante the unfor- 
giving, and Savonarola the reformer. There are 
also Jerry McAuley the river thief, and Sam Jones 
the drunkard, and Dwight L. Moody the shoe-clerk, 
and Channing the saint, and Martineau the philoso- 
pher, and Robertson the preacher, and Fox the mys- 
tic, and Bradford Lee Gilbert the inventor of the 
skyscraper and great soul-saver, and Frank Wakeley 
Gunsaulus the educator and orator, and Willis and 
Edgar MacDonald, brothers in blood and lovers of 
Christ and men. Oh, it is a glorious company! 
Ah, yes, but look again. They are just men made 
perfect. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, blood 
of our blood, see what the grace of God in Christ 
has wrought for them! I shall not try to describe 
it, because it cannot be said or thought or pictured. 
It would be somewhat like my telling the tadpole of 
long ago that above him were the blue sky and vel- 
vet grass and gorgeous birds and immortal humans! 
Things which eyes cannot see, things which ears 
cannot hear, things which have not entered into the 
heart of man—even the things God has prepared 
for them that love Him. Nor has this perfected 
human society to which we have come and are com- 
ing, been suddenly improvised or extemporaneously 
produced. It has its beginnings in something older 
than mind, more ancient than matter, more antique 
than atoms; it is as old as the Heart of God and as 
green and vital as His long, eternal purpose. “For 
whom He foreknew,” says Paul, “He also foreor- 
dained to be conformed to the image of His son, 
that He might be the first-born among many breth- 


194 THE UNFATHOMABLE CHRIST 


ren: and whom He foreordained, them He also 
called: and whom He called, them He also justified : 
and whom He justified, them He also glorified.” 
One of the choicest who in recent years to shed 
his body join the great society of the living dead 
was John Henry Jowett. Jowett’s soul was full of 
loveliness and awe and pity. He wandered into our 
confused time like a saint out of the Middle Ages— 
a kind of Francis of Assisi. And yet—make no 
mistake—Jowett read our ailments far more clearly 
than most of us who are fond of preaching and pre- 
scribing temporary measures of relief. Looking 
round upon us, he understood our fevers, our strife 
of tongues, our industrial and political meanness, 
our national and international hatreds. Then he 
spoke as one having authority because he himself _ 
was authentic with the glad tidings of God in Christ. 
When such spiritual and interpreting focus is prop- 
erly made in a human being, the result is unique, 
magnetic, faith-inspiring, Christ-compelling. And 
such was Jowett. Laid aside and waiting for the 
chariots of God, he was ofttimes companioned by 
a vicar of the Church of England. ‘Said my friend 
once,” writes the vicar, ‘Lord, I am one of the 
cavalry, and I am laid low!’ Then the Lord said to 
me, ‘You are not one of the cavalry, you are one of 
My sheep.’”’ Well, if a soldier, Jowett fought in 
the good fight; if a sheep, he is now folded in the 
Heavenly Sheepfold—one of the spirits of just men 
made perfect. To all such souls, death is a door 
opening not upon outer gloom, but into inner bloom! 


Printed in the United States of America 





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